Harrison Birtwistle
Post-War · 1934–2022
Harrison Birtwistle came from Accrington, a mill town in Lancashire, where he was born in 1934 and played clarinet in local bands as a boy. At music college in Manchester he fell in with a group of fellow students, including Peter Maxwell Davies, who set out to drag British music into the modern age.
His music is craggy, ritualistic, and loud when it wants to be, often built like a procession or a ceremony rather than a story. Opera and myth ran through his career, from Punch and Judy to The Mask of Orpheus, and he had a gift for scandal: his saxophone piece Panic, premiered at the Last Night of the Proms in 1995, provoked a flood of complaints from television viewers expecting cozier fare. He had been knighted years earlier, and the scandal cost him nothing.
Start with Secret Theatre, a piece for fourteen players where instruments step forward from the group like actors taking the stage.
38 works in the catalog, across 5 genres. Log what you listen to with Opus, the classical music journal for iPhone.
Chamber
- Secret Theatre, for 14 instruments
- 5 Distances for 5 Instruments, for wind quintet
- 9 Movements, for string quartet
- An Interrupted Endless Melody, for oboe and piano, "To the Memory of Janet Craxton"
- Chorale from a Toy-Shop, for 5 instruments
- Duets for Storab, for 2 flutes
- Hoquetus Petrus, for 2 flutes and piccolo trumpet
- Linoi, for clarinet and piano
- Refrains and Choruses, for wind quintet
- String Quartet, "The Tree of Strings"
- Tragoedia, for chamber ensemble
- Trio, for violin, cello and piano
- Verses for Ensembles, for 5 winds, 5 brass, and 3 percussion
- Verses for Ensembles, for wind quintet
Keyboard
- Berceuse de Jeanne
- Hector's Dawn
- Oockooing Bird
- Sad Song
Orchestral
- Carmen Arcadiae Mechanicae Perpetuum, for orchestra
- Earth Dances
- Endless Parade, for trumpet, vibraphone, and strings
- Gawain's Journey, for orchestra
- Melancolia 1, for clarinet, harp, 2 string orchestras
- Night's Black Bird, for orchestra
- Panic, for saxophone, drum kit, and orchestra
- Silbury Air, for chamber orchestra
- The Cry of Anubis, for tuba and orchestra
- The Shadow of Night, for orchestra
- The Triumph of Time
Stage
- Punch and Judy Opera
- The Mask of Orpheus Opera
Vocal
- 3 Settings of Celan, for soprano and 5 instruments
- Bogenstrich, for voice and piano
- Meridian, for mezzo-soprano, horn, cello, chorus or 6 sopranos, and instrumental ensemble
- Nenia: the Death of Orpheus, for soprano and ensemble
- Nine Settings Of Lorine Niedecker, for soprano and cello
- Three Settings Of Lorine Niedecker, for soprano and cello
- White and Light, for soprano and 5 instruments
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