räsonanz – Munich 2019
Sir Harrison Birtwistle
Sir Harrison Birtwistle was born in Accrington, in the north of England, in 1934. He studied clarinet and composition at the Royal Manchester College of Music, where he met a group of highly talented contemporaries: Peter Maxwell Davies, Alexander Goehr, John Ogdon and Elgar Howarth. In 1965, he decided to work exclusively as a composer and travelled to Princeton as a Harkness Fellow, where he completed his opera Punch and Judy. Together with Verses for Ensembles and The Triumph of Time, this piece established Birtwistle’s reputation as one of the leading voices in British music.
A career should never outpace one's own inner growth. Aspects such as sound and tonal volume need time to develop. This is not just a question of hands, muscles or technique. Imagination must also develop.
His work between 1973 and 1984 is dominated by the monumental lyrical tragedy The Mask of Orpheus, which premiered at the English National Opera in 1986, and by a series of remarkable ensemble works performed by the most important ensembles for new music: Secret Theatre, Silbury Air and Carmen Arcadiae Mechanicae Perpetuum. Large-scale works from the following decade include the operas Gawain and The Second Mrs Kong, the concertos Endless Parade for trumpet and Antiphonies for piano, and the orchestral piece Earth Dances.
You cannot compose your time with music. You can only compose yourself. It is impossible to sit down and say: Now I will express myself or my time.
His more recent works include Exody, which was premiered by the Chicago Symphony Orchestra under Daniel Barenboim, and Panic for saxophone, percussion and orchestra, whose world premiere at the Last Night of the BBC Proms in 1995 was broadcast worldwide to an estimated audience of 100 million. Chamber music works composed in recent years include Pulse Shadows, an hour-long meditation on poems by Paul Celan for soprano, string quartet and ensemble (a CD recording has been released by Teldec), and the piano cycle Harrison’s Clocks, composed for Joanna MacGregor.
The musical theatre piece The Last Supper premiered on 18 April 2001 at the Staatsoper Unter den Linden in Berlin, followed by performances in Glyndbourne in October of the same year. The ensemble piece Theseus Game premiered in 2003 as part of the RuhrTriennale. New musical theatre works are being created for the Aldeburgh Festival and Almeida Opera, as well as for the Royal Opera House Covent Garden.
