Composer of the Week: Harrison Birtwistle

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Composer of the Week

Music: Classical

An informative guide to composers' lives and their music.

An informative and accessible guide to composers' lives and their music.

Composer of the Week: Harrison Birtwistle (b 1934): Developing a Voice

Harrison Birtwistle (b 1934)

Developing a Voice

BBC Radio 3 - Composer of the Week, Harrison Birtwistle (b 1934), Developing a Voice

Donald Macleod meets Sir Harrison Birtwistle to discuss his early compositional life.

Donald Macleod meets Sir Harrison Birtwistle to discuss his early compositional life, including his early years with the so-called Manchester school of composers.

This week Donald Macleod meets Sir Harrison Birtwistle, described as “the most forceful and uncompromisingly original composer of his generation”. We hear his major compositions, broadly in chronological order, and reveal the preoccupations and processes behind a singular music imagination. 

In this episode, Birtwistle talks about his daily working life, and about his early years at what was then the Royal Manchester College of Music.
He tells Donald about how his problems with formal education didn't stop him becoming a voracious reader. Beginning as a clarinettist, he found himself developing a creative inner life beyond being an instrumentalist, and wanting to create a music that didn’t exist.  We also hear about the infamous premiere of his first opera Punch and Judy at Aldeburgh, where much of the audience – including its commissioner Benjamin Britten – walked  out at the interval.

Oockooing Bird
Stephen Pruslin, piano

Refrains and Choruses
The Galliard Ensemble

Punch and Judy (The Resolve; Passion Aria; Adding Song)
Stephen Roberts, baritone (Punch)
Jan Degaetani, mezzo-soprano (Judy)
David Wilson-Johnson, baritone (Choregos)
The London Sinfonietta
David Atherton, cond.

Tragoedia
Ensemble InterContemporain
Pierre Boulez, cond.

Producer: Iain Chambers

Composer of the Week: Harrison Birtwistle (b 1934)

Live music and the arts: broadcasts more live music than any other radio network. Classical music is its core. Genres include world and new music, jazz, speech and drama.

Donald Macleod meets composer Sir Harrison Birtwistle to talk about his life and music.

This week Donald Macleod meets Sir Harrison Birtwistle, described as 'the most forceful and uncompromisingly original composer of his generation'.

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Harrison Birtwistle (b 1934)

Developing a Voice

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