Birtwistle reviews

Variations (Clare Hammond)

Clare Hammond (piano) (BIS)

A Bag of Bagatelles (Beethoven & Birtwistle)

Nicolas Hodges (piano) (Wergo)

Simon Rattle’s LSO directorial debut brilliantly captured in no-frills film

‘There are no visual gimmicks, no additional features, and not even the titles of the works in the programme are shown’

Harrison Birtwistle: Slow Frieze Antiphonies

Performed by Marcus Weiss, Christian Dierstein, Antonia Schreiber, Nicolas Hodges, WDR Sinfonieorchester Köln conducted by Stefan Asbury; the Birmingham Contemporary Music Group conducted by Martyn Brabbins and Windkraft Tirol conducted by Kasper de Roo.

Birtwistle

Birtwistle’s cantata Angel Fighter was written for St Thomas Leipzig, JS Bach’s own church. But, as Paul Griffiths observes in his insightful notes, it’s Stravinsky who haunts the score, from the first bassoon duo. Birtwistle unleashes all his powers as a stage composer onto Stephen Plaice’s text, using the whole building to create a thrilling dramatisation of the Bible story, with the life-and-death struggle of the Angel and Jacob at its heart.

Birtwistle

It would be a lie to say that I understand most of the music on this disc. All one can do with music as esoteric as this is to remember the greatness of what Birtwistle has written before and go on listening. The best way to approach it is to take the central item, called Bogenstrich – Meditations on a poem of Rilke and work outwards from there. It consists of a very beautiful love poem, sung twice in different versions.

Birtwistle: The Moth Requiem

If you feel alarm at the prospect of listening to Birtwistle, then just put it on, read the excellent booklet and its song texts, and let his highly personal, unmistakable music wash over you. This is a wonderful and important release of his powerful and often delicate works. Best, perhaps, to begin with On the Sheer Threshold of the Night, which is a kind of spin-off from The Mask of Orpheus: recounting and reflecting on Orpheus’s fatal backward glance at Eurydice, Threshold is direct, poignant and exquisite.

Birtwistle Complete String Quartets

Birtwistle: Night's Black Bird

Birtwistle may be a musical bogeyman for some, but these are among the most powerful orchestral pieces of recent years. Both The Shadow of Night and Night’s Black Bird are related to Dürer’s engraving Melencolia 1, which inspired a work with that title in the mid 1970s. Each of them, too, is musically underpinned by a song by that master of melancholy, John Dowland.

Arutiunian, Birtwistle, Jost, Roger: Arutiunian: Trumpet Concerto; Birtwistle: Endless Parade; Jost: PietÃ ; Roger: Concerto Grosso No. 1, Op.27

Arutiunian’s Concerto is a favourite among trumpeters who can relish its combination of lush harmonies, folksy melodies, and virtuoso display. Musically it’s thin stuff, but Philippe Schartz adopts a suitably vibrato-laden tone, and is more than equal to the technical demands of the work.

Arutiunian, Birtwistle, Jost, Roger: Arutiunian: Trumpet Concerto; Birtwistle: Endless Parade; Jost: PietÃ ; Roger: Concerto Grosso No. 1, Op.27

Arutiunian’s Concerto is a favourite among trumpeters who can relish its combination of lush harmonies, folksy melodies, and virtuoso display.

Musically it’s thin stuff, but Philippe Schartz adopts a suitably vibrato-laden tone, and is more than equal to the technical demands of the work.

Birtwistle: The Axe Manual, Harrison's Clocks, Oockooing Bird

Compared with some of his peers –

Ligeti, Stockhausen, Boulez –

Birtwistle has written relatively little

for the piano. But by including the

punningly titled The Axe Manual,

the piece for piano and percussion

written for Emanuel Ax and

Evelyn Glennie in 2000, as well as

the teenage (yet already typically

melancholic) Oockooing Bird and the

1960 Webern-esque miniature Précis,

and rounding up six occasional and

birthday pieces, there is enough for

Nicolas Hodges to fill a CD decently.

Birtwistle: Five Distances for Five Instruments; The Silk House Tattoo; 17 Tate Riffs

On this very useful, excellently performed short CD, all three pieces use space in one way or another as an intrinsic element of their musical language. The 17 Tate Riffs is the least substantial but also the most elaborate work here; commissioned to celebrate the opening of Tate Modern in 2000, it was designed to exploit the vast space of the gallery’s Turbine Hall by projecting the playing of the 15 instrumentalists around the hall, overlaid on a tape background of drones and natural and electronically generated birdsong.

Birtwistle: Tragoedia; Five Distances; Three Settings of Celan; Secret Theatre

Tragoedia and Secret Theatre are two of Harrison Birtwistle’s finest compositions. The former is the work by which he firmly established himself; like Punch and Judy, the opera it spawned, the piece is immediate in impact, often aggressive; its block-like, almost symmetrical structure makes it surprisingly easy to follow. It’s good to see the work return to the catalogue.

Rachmaninov,Prokofiev,Nyman,Machaut,Dowland, Birtwistle, Ives, Ravel, etc

Singers sometimes venture into the wordless, quasi-instrumental genre of the vocalise, so why shouldn’t an instrumentalist tackle some songs without their words? In this collection, drawing on everything from Rachmaninov and Prokofiev (genuine vocalises, these), right back to Guillaume de Machaut, and forward to Stanley Myers and Michael Nyman, that’s just what John Harle does.

Birtwistle: Panic; Earth Dances

Shorn of the attention it received at its premiere at the Last Night of the 1995 Proms, Panic seems just another example of the ‘instrumental theatre’ that Harrison Birtwistle has made all his own. John Harle’s alto saxophone is the chorus leader, wailing, snarling and skirling almost continuously for 18 minutes. He is challenged more than aided by the drumkit of Paul Clarvis and accompanied by a typical Birtwistle ensemble of wind and percussion. It may not be among its composer’s best examples: neither material nor structure is strong enough to sustain attention consistently.

Birtwistle: Secret Theatre; The Death of Orpheus; Ritual Fragment

Birtwistle’s Secret Theatre has joined that very select group of difficult postwar pieces which have been recorded more than once. This is actually the third version, more evidence of the baffling economics of contemporary music recording; can there really be enough Birtwistle fans out there to support three rival versions? One hopes so, for they all have their virtues.

Birtwistle: Gawain

Collins should be commended for bringing to disc with reasonable promptness a performance of Birtwistle’s opera Gawain, only five years old yet already occupying an impressive niche in the gallery of recent British music. Collins has chosen a BBC broadcast from the 1994 Covent Garden revival, a reading conducted by Elgar Howarth that balances the need both of voices to be clearly heard and of the instrumental textures to speak in their own right.

Birtwistle/Maxwell/Holt

The English oboist Melinda Maxwell, long a champion of new music, developed particular links while still a student and young professional with Harrison Birtwistle and other composers closely associated with him. She remains a first-rate player, in this and other repertoires, coupling beauty and variety of tone to an intelligence as well as sheer agility in conveying often complex, demanding scores. This 33-minute disc is an apt, though too brief, celebration of her talents; she’s not heard as much these days as she should be.

Birtwistle: Punch and Judy

This is a welcome reissue of the 1979 recording of Birtwistle’s first opera, with the London Sinfonietta under David Atherton (who also conducted the first performances at the 1968 Aldeburgh Festival). It shows the composer’s early preoccupation with myth-making – the story’s violence, as expressed in the music, is contained within an inventive and often witty ritualised formality.

Birtwistle: Melencolia 1; Ritual Fragment; Meridian

Birtwistle’s output remains scandalously neglected on disc, but the latest issue from the consistently enterprising NMC label at last brings into the catalogue two of his most substantial works of the Seventies. Both Meridian, a setting of poems by Thomas Wyatt and Christopher Logue from 1971, and Melencolia 1, for clarinet, harp and two string orchestras completed five years later, were composed in the shadow of Birtwistle’s work on the music drama The Mask of Orpheus.

Birtwistle: Antiphonies; Nomos; An Imaginary Landscape

Nearly 70 minutes of Birtwistle both old and new create a striking portrait of this rugged individualist. Antiphonies for piano and orchestra, premiered last year, shares its densely glittering texture with another recent work, the opera Gawain. In contrast, An Imaginary Landscape of 1971, and Nomos, of three years earlier, have the capacity to captivate by their powers of suggestion.

Birtwistle: The Mask of Orpheus

Harrison Birtwistle’s epic Mask of Orpheus is so large and complex that, masterpiece though many believe it to be, the work has not been seen in the theatre since its premiere performances at London’s English National Opera in 1986. The present recording is the fruit of a 1996 London semi-staged performance by BBC forces.

Maxwell Davies, Goehr, Birtwistle

This is a well-thought-out CD, with tracks of clarinet, piano, and clarinet with piano, leading to the final quintet. And who says that the Sixties avant-garde was all dry and cerebral? Hymnos burns rubber like a vintage Harley Davidson, and doesn’t let up for its exhilarating 12 minutes. Two other aspects of Maxwell Davies are on view here: the parody technique in Sub tuam protectionem, where Dunstaple’s original is covered with a commentary which eventually silences it; and the tonal, folk-like sound of Stevie’s Ferry to Hoy, one of the composer’s many works for children.