Harrison Birtwistle

Composer

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  Harrison Birtwistle was born in Accrington in 1934 and studied clarinet and composition at the Royal Manchester College of Music. In 1965 he sold his clarinets to devote his efforts to composition, and travelled to Princeton as a Harkness Fellow where he completed the opera Punch and Judy. This work, together with Verses for Ensembles and The Triumph of Time, firmly established Birtwistle as a leading voice in British music.

  The decade from 1973 to 1984 was dominated by his monumental lyric tragedy The Mask of Orpheus, and by the series of remarkable ensemble scores: Secret Theatre, Silbury Air, Carmen Arcadiae Mechanicae Perpetuum and agm.

  Important large-scale compositions are the operas Gawain, The Second Mrs Kong and The Last Supper, the concertos Panic, Antiphonies and Concerto for Violin and Orchestra, as well as the orchestral scores Earth Dances, Exody and The Shadow of Night. Other major works include Theseus Game for large ensemble and two conductors, Neruda Madrigales for chorus and instruments, Angel Fighter and In Broken Images. Smaller-scale pieces include Pulse Shadows, the cycle of piano works Harrison’s Clocks, Orpheus Elegies for oboe, harp and countertenor, stage works The Corridor, The Io Passion, Tree of Strings for string quartet and The Moth Requiem for female voices and instruments.

  The music of Birtwistle has attracted international conductors including Daniel Barenboim, Pierre Boulez, Christoph von Dohnányi, Vladimir Jurowski, Oliver Knussen, Simon Rattle and Franz Welser-Möst. He has received commissions from leading performing organizations, and his music has been featured in major festivals and concert series in Europe, the USA and Japan. Birtwistle has received many honours including the 1986 Grawemeyer Award, the Chévalier des Arts et des Lettres (1986), a British knighthood (1988) and the Siemens Prize (1995). He was made Companion of Honour in 2001. Recordings of his music are available on the Teldec, Decca, Philips, Deutsche Grammophon, Etcetera, NMC and Metronome labels.

  Harrison Birtwistle is currently composing Songs from the same Earth for tenor and piano and a piano concerto which will be performed in Munich, London, Porto and Boston in 2014 during his 80th year.

  Harrison Birtwistle is published by Boosey & Hawkes and Universal Edition.

  Please click here for Harrison Birtwistle’s current timeline.

  Harrison Birtwistle is represented worldwide by Andrew Rosner at Rayfield Allied.
  This biography is for information only and should not be reproduced.

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  • The Minotaur
    Royal Opera House - Revival

    Five years on, a revival allows us to reconsider those first impressions. And as the overture’s great surges of sound body forth the projection of sea-swell on the front-drop – with the percussion spilling into boxes on either side of the pit – one realises anew what an orchestral master Birtwistle is.

    Michael Church, The Independent

    Harrison Birtwistle’s opera The Minotaur, like the myth it is based on, reveals deeper truths on each re-hearing. When it was new in 2008 David Harsent’s richly poetic libretto and Birtwistle’s score already seemed a potent mix, but as this revival makes clear, closer acquaintances with its complexities rewards the listener.

    Barry Millington, The Evening Standard

    Birtwistle’s score is characteristically abrasive, at times hitting home to devastating effect; yet elsewhere its hyper-tense lyricism is equally impressive.

    George Hall, The Stage

    The Minotaur’s first revival, with all three main singers returning, confirms it as a work of extraordinary power.

    Erica Jeal, The Guardian *****

    The inexorable pace of this monolithic score, in fact consisting of constant, bring threads of melody rising up from low woodwind to sinewy high strings, and splashed with every king of sensuous percussion from temple blocks and bongos to harp and cimbalom, will crush you if you don’t listen and overwhelm you in the best sense if you do.

    Fiona Maddocks, The Observer

    The opera looks good and sounds overwhelming. Birtwistle’s music moves at a slow, inexorable pace, piling up sounds that hang in the air, such as dark clouds of strings or the long, wailing cries of the woodwind, interrupted when drama calls by explosive percussion and drums played by musicians outside the pit.

    Richard Fairman, Financial Times

    One must respect and admire a composer of such integrity, so assured in his technique and so steadfast and confident in his imaginative journey... in the opera’s last moments, as the dying Minotaur assumes a tragic dignity, Birtwistle proves that he can write powerfully and expressively for the human voice.

    Rupert Christianson, Daily Telegraph

    Birtwistle’s visceral piece has lost none of its immediacy since it first appeared at Covent Garden. In fact, although the shock value is as high in Stephen Langridge’s skilful production, the relationships between its major characters seem more intense, and the opera’s psychological message hits harder.

    Neil Fisher, The Times

    Birtwistle’s score, proving the composer a master of pacing both of drama and orchestral colour, and The Minotaur to be a 21st century opera classic deserving performances everywhere. It is a great night in the theatre. It is grand opera in the grandest sense of the word, very strong, very special, powerfully staged by director Stephen Langridge and designer Alison Chitty. Birtwistle writes from the heart, big structures, beautiful arced melodies. Dark, violent and intense like his early Punch and Judy, it is magnificently melancholy, forcing you to focus on the bestial side of human behaviour. The opening of Dowland’s song “In Darkness Let Me Dwell” subtly pervades the score, like the doom laden clang of the cimbalom. The music falls downwards whenever there is a descent, and in the most haunting of its orchestral Toccatas a twisting winding melody on strings evokes Theseus journeying with the ball of string down through the treacherous Labyrynth to kill the Minotaur. John Tomlinson has an unnerving ability to bring out the pathos and deep anguish of this poor ‘half and half’. Seeing it from the Minotaur’s point of view is a stroke of genius. Like the Minotaur himself, John Tomlinson’s performance could well become legendary and is superbly captured on the ROH Opus Arte DVD, the World Premiere Recording, conducted by Antonio Pappano, a must for all who saw it or missed it.

    Malcolm Crowthers, Facades Online

    When The Minotaur was first performed in 2008, it was the work’s sheer dramatic power and faultless pacing that above all seemed so overwhelmingly impressive. This time around, in the Royal Opera’s first revival of Stephen Langridge’s spare, elegant production and without the outstanding trio of principals who created their roles five years ago, it was the sheer beauty of Birtwistle’s music and the way it defines the visceral drama so precisely that regularly took the breath away. Ryan Wigglesworth, who had taken over when Antonio Pappano withdrew from the revival with tendonitis, teased out the score’s long skeins of string lines, its fusillades of percussion and the extra tang provided by cimbalom and saxophone with the practiced assurance of a conductor who understands Birtwistle’s sound world completely. As a piece of music theatre, too, the opera seemed as impressive an achievement as it did at the premiere.

    Andrew Clements, Opera Magazine

  • Articles about Harrison Birtwistle
    2013

    Harrison Birtwistle BBC Music Magazine British Composer Award (February 2013)

  • Articles about Harrison Birtwistle
    2011- 2012

    Tom Service's Guide to Harrison Birtwistle's Music

    Harrison Birtwistle BBC Music Magazine Composer of the Month (March 2011)

    Ivan Hewitt writes about Harrison Birtwistle in the Daily Telegraph (September 2011)

    Tom Service on Harrison Birtwistle and myth in The Guardian (June 2012)

• Harrison Birtwistle List of Compositions

  • List of Compositions - Boosey & Hawkes

  • List of Compositions - Universal Edition

  Harrison Birtwistle Discography

  • Discography

• Photos

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    Photographer Credit: Hanya Chlala

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    Photographer Credit: Hanya Chlala

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    Photographer Credit: Hanya Chlala

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