Sir Harrison Birtwistle
*15.07.1934

Future Performances

Secret Theatre
12.02.2012, Gateshead (GB)
Gawain's Journey
17.02.2012, München (D)
Secret Theatre
18.02.2012, Tel Aviv (IL)
Silbury Air
28.02.2012, Oxford (GB)
Secret Theatre
12.03.2012, Gateshead (GB)

News

  • Harrison Birtwistle
    Birtwistle’s Punch and Judy in Geneva
    Birtwistle’s Punch and Judy in Geneva
    The Grand Théâtre de Genève is now showing the joint production by the English National Opera and [...]

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Sir Harrison Birtwistle

The Composer

Sir Harrison Birtwistle was born in Accrington in the north of England in 1934 and studied clarinet and composition at the Royal Manchester College of Music, making contact with a highly talented group of contemporaries including Peter Maxwell Davies, Alexander Goehr, John Ogdon and Elgar Howarth. In 1965 he sold his clarinets to devote all 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 [...]

About the Music

The anecdote may be apocryphal but it has a symbolic value: the world premiere of Punch and Judy, Harrison Birtwistle’s “tragical comedy or comical tragedy”, on 8 June 1968 in Aldeburgh, was attended by Benjamin Britten. Apparently, at one point, Britten could not bear it any longer and left his box before the performance ended. Twenty-one years lie between the births of the two composers – not quite a generation but enough to make them representatives of two wholly different worlds. The older composer just could not find access to that of his younger colleague.

Britten and Birtwistle have one thing in common: unlike some of their compatriots, both have made it across [...]

10 of 83 Works

... agm ... | for 16 voices and 3 instrumental ensembles 1979
An die Musik | for soprano and chamber ensemble 1988
Antiphonies | for piano and orchestra 1992
Antiphonies from the Moonkeeper | for trumpet –
Berceuse de Jeanne | for piano –
Bow Down | Improvised music theatre | for 5 actors and 4 musicians 1977
Cantata | for soprano and instruments 1969
Carmen Arcadiae Mechanicae Perpetuum | for ensemble 1978
Carmen Arcadiae Mechanicae Perpetuum | for chamber orchestra 1978
Carmen Paschale | Motet | for choir and organ 1965

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