Harrison Birtwistle

Claire Booth (Hanna), Roderick Williams (Alan), Harrison Birtwistle (composer), Baldur Brönnimann (conductor), Omar Ebrahim  (Caleb Raven)

Curtain calls for Yan Tan Tethera

Barbican Hall, London, May, 2014

Birtwistle at 80

Well, damn. Harrison Birtwistle died this morning, age 87, and another giant passes from the music scene.

His music isn't performed often in the United States. To give you an idea, the NY Philharmonic performed six of his works in six seasons between 1974-75 and 2007-08; the BSO performed 14 works between 1970-71 and 2017-18. A number of those were at Tanglewood. The only music director of those orchestras to have conducted a Birtwistle work was (bet you can guess) Pierre Boulez. Christoph von Dohnanyi led Birtwistle works at both orchestras.

I've managed to see three of his operas and an assortment of his chamber works, but it's mostly been on visits to London. The Eco Ensemble performed Secret Theatre a few years back and that's it for local performances that I've seen. 

In 2014, there was a festival in honor of his 80th birthday, where I saw Earth Dances (LSO), the operas Gawain and Yan Tan Tethera, both semi-staged, and Oliver Knussen conducting the Birmingham Contemporary Music Group in chamber music (link is to Mark Berry's review). In my last trip before the pandemic, I caught the ENO's Orpheus series, which included The Mask of Orpheus (link is to my review of the series).

Several years ago, I asked one of Birtwistle's publishers about U.S. performances of his operas, and they had never rented any of his opera scores for an American performance. Birtwistle was one of today's great opera composers, and I am sure that Gawain, Yan Tan Tethera, and The Minotaur could all be successfully produced here. I'm surprised that more choruses haven't taken up his Moth Requiem, a lament for vanishing species; it is extremely beautiful, scored for a women's chorus, harp, and flute. Yan Tan Tethera is an ideal Birtwistle gateway work; it is a charming story involving the right way to count sheep and an encounter with the devil. There's also a chorus of sheep! Gawain is a most serious and powerful work, based on the medieval poem Sir Gawain and the Green Knight.

Birtwistle was a member of the so-called Manchester school, which also included the late Peter Maxwell Davies and Alexander Goehr, still living at 90 - a varied group! His music is complex, uncompromising, often outrageously loud, and well worth getting to know.

I spotted him across a courtyard on the Festspielhaus grounds during Götterdämmerung at the 2015 Bayreuth Festival, and at the next interval, I was able to get his autograph. Time to find that notebook and finally get it framed.

RIP Sir Harrison Birtwistle, one of the greats.

Obituaries and other useful links:

• David Allen, NY Times. I take issues with a couple of things in this obituary. Secret Theatre is a chamber work, not an orchestral piece. And it's hard to characterize The Mask of Orpheus as one of the composer's "most successful" operas, given that it has never been performed outside of London. I believe there have been only two full stagings, at the 1980s premiere and in 2019, plus a semi-staging at the Proms one year. Yes, it did win the Grawemeyer, but...
• Anastasia Tsioulcas, Deceptive Cadence
• Ivan Hewitt, The Guardian
• Jill Lawless and Robert Barr, Washington Post
• BBC obituary
• Bayan Northcott, classical-music.com
• Thomas May, Memeteria; includes a link to Birtwistle discussing his own music.
• Andrew Clements of The Guardian on Birtwistle's music
• Bryan Applewood interviews Harrison Birtwistle on the occasion of the 2019 Mask of Orpheus
• Bruce Duffie interviews Harrison Birtwistle
• Birtwistle at Boosey & Hawkes
• Birtwistle at Universal Edition