Birtwistle delved instead into the more harrowing side of nature, as in his unearthly “The Moth Requiem” (2012) for female voices, and the volcanic “Earth Dances” (1986), a vast score that divided the orchestra into six bubbling, geological “strata” of instruments, each erupting over separate time scales. He had no time for the pastorals of more recent forerunners like Ralph Vaughan Williams, whose influence on his earliest works was quickly abandoned. Birtwistle was inescapably an English composer, taking inspiration from distant predecessors, such as the Renaissance musician John Dowland, and incorporating even old techniques like the medieval hocket.
Instrumental one moment in time series#
The moving “Concerto for Violin and Orchestra” (2009-10) engaged the soloist Christian Tetzlaff in a series of duets with individual players, dissecting and reforming the genre even while extending it. In such works as “Verses for Ensembles” (1969), “Secret Theatre” (1984) and “Cortege” (2007), instrumentalists played musical and dramatic roles, moving between ensembles and around the stage. Orchestral players were sometimes treated as if they were akin to characters in a theater. His compositions tended to be deeply ritualistic, as blocks of material were etched and etched again in sounds dominated by woodwind, brass and percussion. Birtwistle’s interests were always primarily in drama and form, whether writing for the opera house or the concert hall.
Loomis continued, adding that “this is not music from which one derives much sheer pleasure, but it is intently theatrical.” “One did not expect this crusty composer to turn mellow at 73, and he has not done so,” Mr. “Birtwistle’s score is relentlessly modernistic, its astringency serving to underscore the opera’s violence and unremitting tension,” the critic George Loomis wrote in The International Herald Tribune. Greek sources wove a more constant thread, from instrumental works that borrowed ancient structures like the early “Tragoedia” (1965), to his most successful operas: “The Mask of Orpheus,” a massively complex expansion of the tale that won the prestigious Grawemeyer Prize in 1987, and “The Minotaur,” an unsparingly graphic work with baying crowds and a rape scene it had its premiere at Covent Garden in 2008. In “Gawain,” which was given its premiere at the Royal Opera House in 1991, the legend was Arthurian. “This is music made to speak now, authoritatively,” he added, “and (like little else in our time) made to last.” Reviewing “The Shadow of Night,” the critic Paul Griffiths wrote in The New York Times in 2002 that that orchestral work was “like all its predecessors: something strikingly new but heavy with echoes from the past and, indeed, the future.” Birtwistle did, however, he did in a unique style of indelible permanence. Birtwistle, who was active mainly in Europe, said in 1999.
“I can only do one thing, and there is nothing else,” Mr. Dissonant, weighty and to some ears forbidding, they often dwelled on similar themes from piece to piece, interrogating kindred ideas from different angles, developing ideas touched on earlier. Birtwistle’s granitic, earthy works revealed their secrets slowly, and their structures were labyrinthine. His death was announced by a spokesman for his music publisher, Boosey & Hawkes. Harrison Birtwistle, whose intensely theatrical compositions and uncompromising modernism made him the most prominent British composer since Benjamin Britten, died on Monday at his home in Mere, England.
0 kommentar(er)
