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Harrison Birtwistle

(1934– )

Punch and Judy (1967)

Down by the Greenwood Side (1969)

The Mask of Orpheus (1984)

Yan Tan Tethera (1984)

Gawain (1991)

The Second Mrs Kong (1994)

Birtwistle’s tough, dense, and often abrasively loud music has made him a sort of Public Enemy for some concert-goers, a fair number of whom filled the correspondence pages of British newspapers with letters of complaint after his raucous concerto for saxophone and percussion, Panic, was premiered at the last night of the 1995 Proms. But others find him a grainy, granite-hard successor to the English Pastoral composers of the early 20th century, with an underlying lyricism in his writing. And no one could deny that Birtwistle’s music is dramatic. Even his concert works have ritualistic theatre elements, and his stage works proper are usually based on mythical subjects which he adapts to the ritualised kind of story-telling which he has made his own, with events that repeat in cycles rather than unfold in linear terms. The Mask of Orpheus, for example, is a vast multimedia spectacle with electronic effects and a highly complex formal structure which recounts the myth of Orpheus in all its varying forms and different endings. Brought up in Manchester, Birtwistle was a student there at the same time as Peter Maxwell Davies and the careers of the two composers have progressed largely in tandem. Both now have knighthoods, and jockey for position as the leading creative figure in British music after Michael Tippett.