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Sir Harrison Birtwistle © HAnya Chlala Arean PAL
39 classical music 2013 – 1 4
Birtwistle
at 80
Guardian music critic
Andrew Clements introduces
Birtwistle at 80.
For Harrison Birtwistle, music and theatre have
always been inextricably linked. One of his earliest
pieces, composed when he was just eleven, was
a work for three mimes and a solo clarinet (his
own instrument), and even in his instrumental and
orchestral works ever since, there has always been
an unrevealed drama shaping the music. Yet when
he was director of music at the National Theatre in
the 1980s, he often found himself recommending
that directors didn’t need music in their productions;
for him, music has always been too precious,
too necessary, to squander for the sake of it.
Appropriately then, the Barbican’s celebration of
Birtwistle’s 80th birthday next year is centred upon
performances of two of his major music-theatre
works, both collaborations with major British
poets. The series begins with Martyn Brabbins
conducting the BBC Symphony Orchestra in a
concert staging of Gawain, a tale of derring-do
set in the court of King Arthur, with a libretto by
David Harsent based upon the medieval poem
Sir Gawain and the Green Knight. And there’s also
a chance to see again the ‘mechanical pastoral’,
as Birtwistle called it, Yan Tan Tethera, originally
intended for television. With a libretto by Tony
Harrison it’s set in an English pastoral world in
which shepherds count sheep and summon up
magic spells to counter the dark forces of evil.
While Birtwistle has always been adept at
covering his technical tracks as a composer –
he once claimed that the vast musical structure
of Gawain was based on a single chord –
landscapes, whether real or imaginary, ritual or
mundane, have always featured prominently in
his musical world. He is in his way as profoundly
English a composer as any of his predecessors
from the early part of the 20th century, and the
final concert in the Barbican tribute places his
works – the haunting beautiful choral piece
Fields of Sorrow and the Dürer-inspired clarinet
concerto Melancolia I – alongside pieces by
Gustav Holst and Ralph Vaughan Williams.
Gawain 16 May / Page 43
Earth Dances 20 May / Page 43
Birtwistle at 80: Study Afternoon
25 May / Page 44
Knussen / BCMG 25 May / Page 44
Yan Tan Tethera 29 May / Page 44
Fields of Sorrow 30 May / Page 44