Welcome to tonight’s tribute concert to Sir Harrison Birtwistle.
No doubt many of you here tonight will have your own stories of when you first were changed by Harry’s music. My first encounters with it came while studying music at university in London in the 1980s when I attended performances in the Queen Elizabeth Hall of Down by the Greenwood Side, Yan Tan Tethera and Bow Down. Up to that point I did not have much sense of my own cultural identity, compared to that projected by England’s Celtic neighbours, but his music gave me a strong feeling of earthy, raw and ancient traditions that I instantly connected with. Soon after I took part in an ENO Baylis Programme project exploring The Mask of Orpheus and was taken deeper into his world.
Much later, in this job, I have had the honour of meeting and working with musical icons, but none more so than Harry. My first visit to his home after starting at the London Sinfonietta began with a typically gentle provocation, as with a straight face he asked me ‘Well, you going to change the name then?’. Even though we haven’t (of course), I became instantly aware that, nearly 40 years into the history of the Ensemble, Harry rightly assumed his relationship with it – his importance to it, and its importance to him. So, this programme book rather unashamedly celebrates that special relationship, and the tributes at the back are from some of the players and those connected to the Ensemble involved in preparing and staging the projects we performed.
Anyone doing this job will always cherish the joy of commissioning new work, so I’ll always remain proud of several commissions with Harry. Early in my time in this role was a planning meeting in the offices of Boosey & Hawkes with Harry, Janis Susskind (his publisher) and the extraordinary Enzo Restagno, the artistic director of the MITO festival which was staging a significant eight-concert retrospective of Harry’s work in Milan and Turin. For the London Sinfonietta, this was a huge booking – from a concert staging of The Last Supper through the ensemble and chamber works. And I was able to join with Enzo in committing London Sinfonietta to co-commission In Broken Images. Around the same time, I was organising the 40th anniversary concert for the Ensemble in 2008, and Harry responded with a small but powerful duet The Message (formally a trio with the short side-drum contribution at the end) which he then spontaneously added to with four more duets over the coming years, culminating in our last commission Five Lessons in a Frame in 2016. Several of you in the audience tonight have contributed to realising his commissions or recordings of his music. You deserve our thanks and I have no doubt you will cherish your association with those pieces and his musical tradition.
The Message was inspired by an art work by Bob Law inscribed with the words ‘The purpose of life is to pass the message on’. I hope that in this side-by-side project with students from the Royal Academy of Music (and in the many times we have used his music in our own summer London Sinfonietta training Academy), that we are passing the message of Birtwistle’s music on to future generations of players and conductors as well as to audiences. So, I’m grateful to the Royal Academy of Music for their collaboration tonight, to Londinium for joining us and to Martyn Brabbins for leading us. And thanks to the Southbank Centre where we are Resident, who have been a partner and venue is so many of the works by Harry which we have had the honour to premiere and perform.
The London Sinfonietta’s history has evolved through the influence of different conductors, artistic directors, players, staff and Council members. The organisation has responded to the changing world of contemporary culture, becoming ever more eclectic and often leading the way in its collaborations with other music genres and art forms. But always there from the beginning has been Harry. With recent changes in public funding policy we now face the challenge to evolve again for the sake of our long-term future. I’m sure that, along with all the innovation and transformation required ahead, remembering Harry’s certainty and commitment to the music and ideas he was quietly passionate about will help us sustain a tradition that is so worth caring about.
ANDREW BURKE CHIEF EXECUTIVE & ARTISTIC DIRECTORWe’re the largest arts centre in the UK and one of the nation’s top visitor attractions, showcasing the world’s most exciting artists at our venues in the heart of London. We’re here to present great cultural experiences that bring people together, and open up the arts to everyone.
The Southbank Centre is made up of the Royal Festival Hall, Queen Elizabeth Hall, Purcell Room, Hayward Gallery, National Poetry Library and Arts Council Collection. We’re one of London’s favourite meeting spots, with lots of free events and places to relax, eat and shop next to the Thames.
We hope you enjoy your visit. If you need any information or help, please ask a member of staff. You can also write to us at Southbank Centre, Belvedere Road, London SE1 8XX, or email hello@ southbankcentre.co.uk
Subscribers to our email updates are the first to hear about new events, offers and competitions. Just head to our website to sign up.
We are delighted that you are here with us to share in our tribute to Sir Harrison Birtwistle.
As becomes so evident reading through the memories and reflections in the rest of this programme, the 50+ years’ history of the London Sinfonietta is inextricably and proudly linked to this giant of contemporary classical music. This evening’s programme can give only a hint of his creative output, but we hope that it will illustrate how his work became an inspiration for so many performers and continues to be a reference point for many of today’s aspiring composers.
I would like to thank very much all those who have come together to make this occasion, as well as the supporters of the London Sinfonietta who enabled us to commission and perform Harry’s work from those
early years onwards – it is easy to forget how such international figures start their careers experimenting and developing their techniques with little public recognition and a bit of risk-taking on all sides. My personal sadness is that my own closer association with the London Sinfonietta didn’t overlap more with his, but his pieces will continue to be a foundational part of our story.
“COMPOSING WAS NEVER A JOB FOR HIM. IT WAS HIS VERY BEING. MUSIC JUST KEPT FLOWING FROM HIS MIND AND OUT OF HIS FINGERS, WITH INCREASING PRODUCTIVITY AS THE YEARS WENT BY.”
Sunday 5 March 2023
Southbank Centre’s Queen Elizabeth Hall
Sir Harrison Birtwistle
Duet 1 (The Message) (2008, London Sinfonietta commission)
Virelai (Sus une fontayne) (2008)
Verses for Ensembles (1969, London Sinfonietta commission)
Interval
The Fields of Sorrow (1972)
In Broken Images (2011, London Sinfonietta co-commission)
Martyn Brabbins conductor
Abigail Sinclair soprano
Lisa Dafydd soprano
Londinium (Choir Director Andrew Griffiths)
Royal Academy of Music Manson Ensemble
London Sinfonietta
The London Sinfonietta is grateful to Arts Council England for its support of the ensemble, as well as the many other individuals, trusts and businesses who enable us to realise our ambitions. This event is produced by the London Sinfonietta, and is supported by The Marchus Trust with the friendly support of the Ernst von Siemens Music Foundation. The work of the London Sinfonietta is supported by Arts Council England and the John Ellerman Foundation. London Sinfonietta is grateful to the Birtwistle family for providing the photos used throughout this programme.
It took more than three decades for Sir Harrison Birtwistle’s landmark opera The Mask of Orpheus to receive its second full staging. Many, like me, who had been present at its premiere in 1986, were changed by it. It opened up extraordinary new worlds. While the 2019 production by Daniel Kramer for English National Opera divided audiences and critics, there was unanimity on the power and originality of the musical experience. When the octogenarian Birtwistle and his librettist Peter Zinovieff came to take their curtain call on the opening night, the entire house rose to its feet. This was fitting. It was as if Birtwistle’s work had come full circle, from its roots in 1960s experimentalism when the embryonic ideas for the piece began to take shape, now to appeal afresh to a new, young public not even born when the opera had first been seen in that very same London theatre. It was, quite simply, thrilling to observe a new generation finding its own way into Birtwistle’s music and being enthused by it.
The Mask of Orpheus could never be described as an ‘easy’ work. Its ambition is vast, rich, combining singing, text, theatre, mime, a huge orchestra, electronics, and an intricate musical vocabulary that presents not a linear narrative but rather a central idea from multiple perspectives. Modernist. Uncompromising. These might be considered more appropriate words. And yet somehow it still manages to speak directly, not abandoning operatic forms, but rather rethinking their lyrical conventions for the late 20th century. This is what struck me so powerfully when re-encountering the work in 2019: for all its structural complexity, I was left with the image of Orpheus as an ordinary individual, overcome by grief, lamenting the woman he had lost, who finds his life no longer supportable. And this seems to be the secret of so much of Birtwistle’s music: always challenging, yet always essentially clear and simple in the way it articulates the essence of human experience.
Directness was a facet of the man as well as of the music. Born and raised in Accrington, Harry – as he was universally known – retained throughout his life not just a soft, lilting Lancastrian accent but also a
certain Northern straightforwardness. He knew what he wanted. And he just got on with it. (Beneath the gruff façade, however, there was a gentle, humorous man, who enjoyed sharing the simple pleasures of his garden and kitchen.) His earliest surviving piece, written when he was a teenager, is for piano and is called The Ookooing Bird. Its essential simplicity, its repeating structure, its interest both in the mythical and natural worlds, are all also defining facets of his mature work. It is almost as if he emerged fully formed as a composer, his later compositions being just a working out of these ideas on larger canvases and in new contexts. The beautiful The Moth Requiem (2012) for twelve female singers, three harps and alto flute, for example, is cut from the same cloth and speaks with the same melancholic voice. So many of his works were shaped and coloured by his early musical experiences in the North of England, playing as a clarinettist in a military band and in an amateur opera company’s pit orchestra. Sounds of wind and brass instruments dominate his earlier music (even The Mask of Orpheus has no string section); he relished writing for north-country brass bands in Grimethorpe Aria and Salford Toccata; and he drew on northern folk tales for his music theatre works Bow Down and Yan Tan Tethera. Elsewhere, the craggy landscapes of his childhood re-emerge, most notably in his magnificent orchestral work Earth Dances
He entered the Royal Manchester College of Music in the early 1950s as a clarinettist. And it was there he made the connections that were crucial for his later development as a composer. Composer Peter Maxwell
“…BIRTWISTLE’S MUSIC: ALWAYS CHALLENGING, YET ALWAYS ESSENTIALLY CLEAR AND SIMPLE IN THE WAY IT ARTICULATES THE ESSENCE OF HUMAN EXPERIENCE.”
Davies, pianist John Ogdon and trumpeter Elgar
Howarth were all fellow students. So too was composer Alexander Goehr, son of Schoenberg pupil Walter Goehr, who acted as a conduit not only for the work of the great continental figures of the early 20th century but also for the latest music coming out of Paris and Darmstadt. Together they founded the New Music Manchester group in order to explore these works, as well as to premiere their own. In fact, Birtwistle emerged from his compositional chrysalis relatively late, completing his ‘opus 1’, Refrains and Choruses, at the end of 1957, which was subsequently selected by the Society for the Promotion of New Music for performance at the 1959 Cheltenham Festival.
Birtwistle’s music first caught wide critical attention in the 1960s. The sounds he was making in works like Tragoedia and Verses for Ensembles were bold and exciting. He won a scholarship to study in the USA and it was there he completed his ‘tragical comedy or comical tragedy’, Punch and Judy, premiered at the Aldeburgh Festival in 1969, and which went on to be performed many hundreds of times all over the world. Stylised, ritualised, aggressive violence tempered by a reflective lyricism, it announced a composer not only with a distinctive musical voice but also one completely at ease in the theatre. After a formative period spent working as Music Director at the National Theatre – including making the outstanding music for Peter Hall’s production of Tony Harrison’s northern dialect translation of Aeschylus’ Oresteia trilogy – he went on to write a prodigious series of operas that continued to explore mythological subject-matter: Gawain and The Minotaur for the Royal Opera House, The Second Mrs Kong and The Last Supper for Glyndebourne, and the smaller-scale The Io Passion, The Corridor and The Cure for Aldeburgh. Layered narratives and repeating structures remain a feature of all these works, but also increasingly a focus on character, as well as a more direct kind of lyricism. The hard edges of Punch and Judy were smoothed away somewhat, to reveal a new concern for expression, often of a darkly melancholic kind. Even when Orpheus was not the actual subject of a work, his lamenting voice was still palpable.
This dark melancholy also found its way into his instrumental music. The dawn of the new millennium saw another landmark work for large orchestra, The Shadow of Night, taking its inspiration from various 16th-century melancholic sources, followed by its companion piece Night’s Black Bird, and the equally monumental Deep Time. This lattermost work reveals another longstanding preoccupation of the composer
– going back at least as far as The Triumph of Time (1971–72) – with time and its articulation, not just across the duration of the pieces themselves, but conjuring up a sense of the sublime when confronted with vast, slowly changing, geological processes.
In recent years, in between fulfilling these large-scale commissions, Birtwistle demonstrated the more intimate aspects of his compositional identity. Often working alongside particular players, he produced an important body of chamber works that have found a
“IN RECENT YEARS, IN BETWEEN FULFILLING THESE LARGE-SCALE COMMISSIONS, BIRTWISTLE DEMONSTRATED THE MORE INTIMATE ASPECTS OF HIS COMPOSITIONAL IDENTITY.”Birtwistle in the Queen Elizabeth Hall
regular place in the concert hall. His 26 Orpheus Elegies, for example, settings of Rilke for a typical Birtwistle combination of oboe, harp and countertenor, are beautifully poignant; Songs for the same Earth for tenor and piano bring to his friend David Harsent’s poetry gentle and evocative resonances; the Bogenstrich pieces for cello and piano resulted from a close exploration of the string instrument’s musical and expressive possibilities with Adrian Brendel.
In later decades Harrison Birtwistle became a figure of international standing. Major festivals in Europe, Asia and America featured his work. Commissions came from far and wide, and noted conductors were keen to programme his work, including Barenboim, Boulez, Eötvös and Rattle. He won important prizes – most notably the Grawemeyer Award and Siemens Prize – and received countless honours, among them a Knighthood, the Companion of Honour, and Chevalier dans l’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres. Yet, for him, such success was essentially incidental. What mattered most was the daily routine of disappearing off to his shed (a version of which followed him wherever he lived) to put notes on paper. He once expressed utter surprise when someone asked him when he was going to retire. ‘I just don’t think he understood what I do’, was his bewildered response when later relating the encounter. Composing was never a job for him. It was his very being. Music just kept flowing from his mind and out of his fingers, with increasing productivity as the years went by. Once he had produced enough material for one piece, he would draw a double bar, and then start immediately on the next. In a sense it was this focus, this singlemindedness, that gave his music its unmistakable identity. He composed for himself, not for others. What anyone else thought of his music (aside from those
performing it) was of little consequence to him. Even when his music caused uproar, as the premiere of Panic at the 1995 Proms notoriously did, he was never especially bothered. There was certainly something naughtily provocative about that particular piece, intruding into the polite silliness of the ‘Last Night’; but equally, having been commissioned to write for the occasion, he could hardly have produced anything different. He knew what he wanted, and he simply did what he did. Pan, embodied in Panic’s solo saxophone, was – like Orpheus, like the Green Knight, like the Minotaur – just another of those mythical creatures with which Birtwistle became obsessed, and through which he was able to articulate deep ideas about time and identity, longing and loss. This is the essence of the music of Harrison Birtwistle, and the source of its power. This will be its enduring legacy. And it is to this music we shall return time and again to continue to mine its immense riches.
Duet 1 is a conversation for two instruments. The original title, The Message, derives from a sculpture (see page 21) by Bob Law on which is inscribed ‘the purpose of life is to pass the message on’.
Sir Harrison Birtwistle created the first short piece The Message (Duet 1) for the London Sinfonietta in 2008, as a ‘birthday card’ for their 40th anniversary concert. He then decided to write four more duets for different occasions over the coming years, dedicated to colleagues and supporters of his music. The pieces in the sequence were finally united in one work commissioned by the London Sinfonietta entitled Five Lessons in a Frame, which had its world premiere in 2016.
© Andrew Burke Chief Executive & Artistic Director, London SinfoniettaVirelai (Sus une fontayne) was written for twelve instrumentalists of the London Sinfonietta, who gave its first performance under Elgar Howarth at the Turin Conservatoire on 6 September 2008.
The piece is a realisation of a virelai by Johannes Ciconia, who flourished in the second half of the 14th century, around the time Chaucer was writing his Canterbury Tales. He seems to have been born around 1335 in Liège, but spent much of his life in Avignon and Northern Italy, dying in 1411. A virelai is a type of song common during the 14th century consisting of alternating refrains and stanzas.
Reprinted by kind permission of Joanna MacGregor and Bath Festivals
In Verses for Ensembles, written to a commission from the London Sinfonietta in the winter of 1968-69, Birtwistle exploited the verse-and-refrain concept with greater brilliance and virtuosity than ever before. The ensembles of the title are families of instruments – a quintet of woodwind, a brass quintet and percussion. Throughout the work the groups either operate as units or soloistically; an instrument detaches itself from the ensemble and assumes an independent role, in the process articulating the verse-and-refrain structure of the entire work, a scheme in which the discrete blocks of material may be baldly juxtaposed or overlaid, but never homogenised into a continuous whole.
The tensions created by this method of construction are enormous, and it seems as if the instruments become embroiled in a ritual of mysterious power. It is an early example of the ‘secret theatre’ that was to become increasingly characteristic of Birtwistle’s later output. There is a visual element to the work also, which enhances the feeling of arcane ceremony: the instrumental groups are arrayed on the stage in symmetrical ranks, the higher woodwind to the left, their lower siblings to the right, the brass in a row above them, while the percussion – pitched and unpitched – rise in rows above that. Around the periphery of the ensembles are four solo positions: the two on raised platforms at the rear of the playing area are used exclusively by the trumpets; the two at the very front are shared at various moments in the work by the trumpets, horn or woodwind. It is the migrations of the players between these positions that provide their own map of the work, providing a visual image of linear movement which the music itself seems to do its best to deny.
© Andrew ClementsThe Fields of Sorrow was commissioned for the Dartington Summer School of Music in 1971. It is an expressive and evocative work scored for two solo sopranos, chorus, and a sixteen-piece chamber ensemble featuring two pianos. The text is a highly pictorial poem by the fourth-century poet Ausonius. The score is a beautifully printed quarto of 19 pages that are a visual delight. Sparse, atmospheric scoring, coupled with printing that blocks out the rests and silences, results in many pages that exhibit more open white space than area covered by staves and notes.
For the most part, precise, conventional notation predominates, although there are moments in which some choices, exist for the instruments and moments in which aleatory and prescribed activity occur simultaneously. The composer demonstrates a preference for half-step dissonances and octaves that quietly become ninths. The prevailing mood is both quiet and hypnotic: most of the dynamic markings are softer than pianissimo. The inevitable calm of the final moments emerges from a gradual movement from slightly jagged rhythms and asymmetrical meters toward a plodding, repetitive texture that soothes by insistence. Throughout, the feeling is one of awe and mystery, reflecting the images of the poem – silent lakes and streams, and ageing flowers.
Undoubtedly this is a work that could have great psychological impact when performed well, and a score worthy of its place in libraries.
© Jackson HillHarrison Birtwistle’s In Broken Images took as its starting point the music of Giovanni Gabrieli with its interplay between groups of instruments, but rather than emulating the Venetian composer’s use of echo effects and ritornelli, Birtwistle’s work tracks an independent path in which the music is in a permanent state of exposition. The wind, brass and strings are fiercely independent demonstrating distinct identities, while the percussion underpins each musical family providing the continuum. The fragmented multiplicity of events in Birtwistle’s work is only fully clarified for a single bar, near the end, when the groups play the same music. Otherwise, there is a calculated non-synchronisation of the blocks of material using a hocket technique. After completing the score, the composer recognised that the moment of unity offered an analogy to the Risorgimento: “It wasn’t a conscious thing when I was composing to mirror the political situation but there is a similar moment of coming together. Just as in Italy, though, the different identities continue with each retaining its own distinct ‘cuisine’.”
In Broken Images was co-commissioned by Enzo Restagno, Artistic Director of MITO SettembreMusica International Music Festival and the London Sinfonietta to commemorate the 150th anniversary of the Unity of Italy.
© Boosey & HawkesThe Fields of Sorrow: texts and translations
Errantes silve in magna et sub luce maligna inter harundineasque comas gravidumque papaver et tacitus sine labe lacos, sine murmure rivos, quorum per ripas nebuloso lumina marcent fleti, olim regum et puerorum nomina, flores
Ausonius
They wander in deep woods, in mournful light, Amid long reeds and drowsy-headed poppies, And lakes where no wave laps, and voiceless streams, Upon whose banks in the dim light grow old Flowers that were once bewailed names of kings.
Translated by Helen Waddell
Martyn Brabbins is Music Director of the English National Opera. An inspirational force in British music, he has had a busy opera career since his early days at the Kirov and more recently at La Scala, the Bayerische Staatsoper, and regularly in Lyon, Amsterdam, Frankfurt and Antwerp. He guests with top international orchestras such as the Royal Concertgebouw, San Francisco Symphony, DSO Berlin and Tokyo Metropolitan Symphony, as well as the Philharmonia, BBC Symphony and most of the other leading UK orchestras. He is a popular figure at the BBC Proms, who in 2019 commissioned 14 living composers to write a birthday tribute to him. Known for his advocacy of British composers, he has conducted hundreds of world premieres across the globe. He has recorded nearly 150 CDs to date, including prize-winning discs of operas by Korngold, Birtwistle and Harvey.
He was Associate Principal Conductor of the BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra 1994-2005, Principal Guest Conductor of the Royal Flemish Philharmonic 2009-15, Chief Conductor of the Nagoya Philharmonic 2012-16, and Artistic Director of the Cheltenham International Festival of Music 2005-07. He is Prince Consort Professor of Conducting at the Royal College of Music, Visiting Professor at the Royal Scottish Conservatoire and Artistic Advisor to the Huddersfield Choral Society alongside his duties at ENO, and has for many years supported professional, student and amateur music-making at the highest level in the UK.
Londinium, directed by Andrew Griffiths, is one of London’s most versatile and accomplished nonprofessional chamber choirs, particularly noted for vibrant performances of a cappella repertoire. Founded in 2005, the choir has established a strong reputation for diverse, imaginative and eclectic programming across the centuries with an emphasis on unjustly neglected or rarely performed works, particularly of the 20th century. It is also committed to contemporary music, and has given a number of premiere performances. Londinium’s debut CD of 20th-century English choral music, The Gluepot Connection, released by SOMM Recordings in 2018, was a MusicWeb International Recording of the Year (‘probably my favourite disc of the year’) and praised in Gramophone (‘impressive accomplishment and no mean flair’). The choir recently recorded a disc of choral music by Kenneth Leighton, including the premiere recording of his superb but unpublished major work, Laudes Animantium, for release by SOMM in May 2023.
Londinium performers:
Sophia Anderton
Mike Bolton
Katie Boot
Aubrey Botsford
Fiona Clark
Steve Copeland
Eleanor Cranmer
Simon Funnell
Molly Goetzee
David Henderson
Trevor Heywood
Sophie Hopkins
Peter Johnson
Hilary Lawson
Chris Lemar
Yvonne Light
Chau-Yee Lo
Clare Loosley
Niels Lous
John McLeod
Hazel Mehta
Lucy Myers
António Sá-Dantas
Alison Shiers
Helen Statham
David Stocks
Rebecca Swaine
Chris Swithinbank
Julian Tolan
Michael Tomkins
Grace Vaughan
Maurice Wren
ANDREW GRIFFITHS combines his role as Head Coach & Music Consultant at the National Opera Studio with a busy freelance career in the worlds of opera and choral music.
A former Jette Parker Young Artist at The Royal Opera, he has conducted productions for The Royal Opera (Linbury Theatre), The Royal Ballet, Welsh National Opera, Opera North, Opera Theatre Company, Opera Collective Ireland, Early Opera Company, Mid Wales Opera, Bampton Classical Opera and Iford Opera, and worked as an assistant conductor at Royal Opera House, Glyndebourne, English National Opera, Scottish Opera, Chicago Opera Theatre, and with the BBC Symphony Orchestra. Concert work includes appearances with the Royal Northern Sinfonia, Orchestra of the Swan, Southbank Sinfonia and Orpheus Sinfonia. Andrew frequently broadcasts and records with the BBC Singers, he is Musical Director of Kingston Choral Society and Londinium, regularly conducts for Dartington, and has appeared with the BBC Symphony Chorus, New London Chamber Choir, and Hong Kong’s Tallis Vocalis. He also sings as a member of vocal consort Stile Antico.
Elissavet Archontidi-Tsaldaraki violin
Laura Cooper viola
Niccolò Citrani cello
Ieva Kupreviciute flute/piccolo
Da Som Jeong flute
Fergus McCready oboe/cor anglais
Rebecca Whitehouse oboe/cor anglais
Ivan Rogachev clarinet/bass clarinet
Leo Kerr clarinet/bass clarinet
Bethany Crouch clarinet/contrabass clarinet
Heidi Walliman bassoon/contrabassoon
Sophia Smaditch bassoon
John Vernon trumpet/piccolo trumpet
Jasmin Ghera trumpet
Samuel Dawes trombone
James Owen trombone
Matthew Brett percussion
Timothy Rumsey piano
The Manson Ensemble is the Royal Academy of Music’s specialist contemporary music ensemble. Its first concert was at the Aldeburgh Festival in 1968, and it plays regularly at the Academy and in festivals around the UK. Since its foundation, the ensemble has collaborated with composers including Berio, Boulez and Messiaen in the early days and, more recently, Hans Abrahamsen, Eleanor Alberga, Tansy Davies, Andrew Norman and Anna Thorvaldsdottir.
Other highlights include performing and recording the music of Frank Zappa as part of a Roundhouse/ Zappa Family Trust festival and the Chicago Symphony Orchestra’s Beyond the Score – A Pierre Dream with Susanna Mälkki at the Aldeburgh Festival. CD recordings include Stravinsky’s The Soldier’s Tale, conducted by Oliver Knussen and with George Benjamin, Harrison Birtwistle and Harriet Walter narrating.
Since 2002, the Manson Ensemble has undertaken a major series of Side by Side projects with the London Sinfonietta, including the UK premiere of Nono’s Prometeo, and performances of Stockhausen’s Gruppen, Hymnen and Donnerstag aus Licht, and Thomas Adès’s In Seven Days at the Royal Festival Hall.
Canadian soprano Abigail Sinclair recently graduated with a Bachelors in Vocal Performance from the University of Toronto where she was a member of their Undergraduate Opera Program. This past Autumn, she began her Masters in Vocal Performance at the Royal Academy of Music under the instruction of Vocal Studies Head, Kate Paterson.
Since joining the Academy, she has been accepted into their prestigious Bach Consort, and will perform the role of Mademoiselle Silberklang from Der Schauspieldirektor in the Academy’s Summer Opera scenes this May.
Part of her practice involves collaboration with emerging composers to create and promote new works. This past Summer, Abigail participated in SongFest in San Francisco where she was selected to premiere the 2022 Sorel Commission – a chamber piece titled Love, Loss and Exile by American composer Juhi Bansal.
Highlights of the 2021/22 season included an Encouragement Award in the Metropolitan Opera Laffont Competition’s Buffalo/Toronto District, and a recital focussing on the depiction of female characters throughout music history with pianist Ria Kim for the Banff Centre’s inaugural EvoFest: Evolution Concert Series.
Abigail is grateful for the support of the Sylva Gelber Music Foundation, the Royal Academy of Music and the Nova Scotia Talent Trust.
Welsh soprano Lisa Dafydd is currently a Masters student at the Royal Academy of Music under the guidance of her tutors, Mary Nelson and Iain Ledingham.
Most recently, Lisa had the opportunity to work alongside the soprano and conductor Barbara Hannigan as a soloist in a concert alongside students from The Juilliard School, performing Delage’s Quatre poèmes hindous.
In September 2022, Lisa performed in the world premiere of Gelert, an opera by Paul Mealor, in which she played one of the lead roles, Siwan. She also participated in an evening of opera scenes with the Royal Academy Opera, playing the roles of Norina in Donizetti’s Don Pasquale, Dalinda in Ariodante by Handel, and Second Niece in Britten’s Peter Grimes
In the most recent National Eisteddfod of Wales, Lisa was awarded the highly prestigious Osborne Roberts Blue Riband Memorial Award and the Violet Mary Lewis Scholarship for the most promising soprano. As part of her prize, she will be travelling to the USA this summer to sing in the North American Festival of Wales.
The London Sinfonietta is one of the world’s leading contemporary music ensembles. Formed in 1968, our commitment to making new music has seen us commission over 450 works and premiere many hundreds more. Resident at the Southbank Centre and Artistic Associate at Kings Place, with a busy touring schedule across the UK and abroad, the London Sinfonietta’s Principal Players are some of the finest musicians in the world.
Our ethos is to experiment constantly with the art form, working with the world’s best composers, performers and artists, collaborating with young people, communities and the public to produce music projects often involving film, theatre, dance and art. We are committed to challenging audience perceptions by commissioning work which addresses issues in today’s society, including work that has tackled climate change, violence towards women and racial inequality. We also work closely with the audience as creators, performers and curators of the events we stage. We
Michael Cox flute/piccolo/alto flute
Gareth Hulse* oboe/cor anglais
Mark van de Wiel* E flat & B flat clarinet/bass clarinet
Timothy Lines clarinet/bass clarinet
Graham Hobbs bassoon/ contrabassoon
Timothy Ellis horn
work with schools and communities across the UK supporting and encouraging their musical creativity, while our annual London Sinfonietta Academy is an unparalleled opportunity for young performers and conductors to train for their future in the profession with our Principal Players.
The London Sinfonietta has also broken new ground by launching its own new digital Channel, featuring video programmes and podcasts about new music. We created Steve Reich’s Clapping Music App for iPhone, iPad and iPod Touch, a participatory rhythm game that has been downloaded over 600,000 times worldwide. The back catalogue of recordings of the Ensemble over 50 years has help cement its worldwide reputation. More recent recordings include George Benjamin’s opera Into the Little Hill (Nimbus), Benet Casablancas’ The Art of Ensemble (Sony Classical), David Lang’s Writing on Water (Cantaloupe Music) Philip Venables’ debut album Below the Belt (NMC) and Marius Neset’s Viaduct (ACT). londonsinfonietta.org.uk
Christian Barraclough trumpet
Ruby Orlowska trumpet
Byron Fulcher* trombone
Ruth Molins trombone
Alexandra Wood violin
Elizabeth Wexler violin
Paul Silverthorne* viola
Zoe Matthews viola
Sally Pendlebury cello
Cecilia Bignall cello
Enno Senft* double bass
Andrew Zolinsky piano
David Hockings* percussion
Joe Richards percussion
Heledd Gwynant percussion
The second half of tonight’s programme includes a Side by Side performance with students from the Royal Academy of Music. The Academy and London Sinfonietta have been working together since 2002, providing young artists with performance experience in a professional setting. This evening’s performance is especially poignant, as Harrison Birtwistle was an alum who had a life-long relationship with the Academy. (See Academy Principal Jonathan Freeman-Attwood’s remembrance of Birtwistle on p30.)
The Royal Academy of Music moves music forward by inspiring successive generations of musicians to connect, collaborate and create. It is the meeting point between the traditions of the past and the talent of the future, seeking out and supporting the musicians today whose music will move the world tomorrow.
From pre-school to post-doc, students come from more than 60 countries to hone their craft. They are challenged to find their own voice, take risks and push boundaries. Simon Rattle, Felicity Lott, Elton John, Edward Gardner, Evelyn Glennie and Jacob Collier all learnt their craft at the Academy.
Students benefit from a stimulating curriculum and an ambitious range of concerts, events and record producing. Legendary artists come to the Academy not just to perform, but to become mentors, friends and musical partners. As it enters its third century, the Academy’s aim is to shape the future of music by discovering and supporting talent wherever it exists.
Founded in 1822, the Royal Academy of Music is the oldest conservatoire in the UK and the second oldest in the world.
Professional Side by Side projects play a unique and indispensable role in high-level musical training at the Academy. They function effectively as artistic work-placements, giving students the experience of rehearsing and performing in a completely professional context. The projects bring multiple benefits, allowing students to exercise their musical skills in an environment that mirrors the industry, to gain a greater understanding of world-class collaborative music making, and learn about professional expectations across many different creative arenas.
At the heart of the Side by Side experience is the mentorship provided by professional partners, which is a key stepping stone from the educational dynamics of one-to-one lessons to the autonomous responsibilities that go with membership of a prestigious ensemble. The projects enable students to develop professional networks and to significantly enhance their long-term employability.
London Sinfonietta was the first organisation to work with the Academy on a Side by Side project in 2002. Partners now also include London Philharmonic Orchestra, Czech Philharmonic Orchestra, Knussen Chamber Orchestra, Academy of Ancient Music and CHROMA.
Find out more at www.ram.ac.uk
Kate Molleson: What was the first piece of Birtwistle you heard, Jonathan?
Jonathan Cross: I can remember it vividly. It was a recording. It was in fact the first piece Birtwistle wrote for the Sinfonietta, Verses for Ensembles, on the wonderful Decca ‘Headline’ label – it had that cover with Birtwistle’s head and his big hair echoing outwards like you were looking at him in a kaleidoscope! It was a friend who said, ‘Do you know any Birtwistle?’ And I replied, ‘Who?’ ‘Listen to this!’, he said.
KM: Who was this excellent friend?
JC: David Allenby, who later became Birtwistle’s publisher at Boosey & Hawkes! We both explored this music together. I’d
have been 18 or 19. It blew me away. In a sense I was looking for music like this that was different: bold, brash. It was its sound world, its energy, the way it moved in and out of the violent and the lyrical that appealed. It suggested a new way of organising music. I also loved the idea of its theatre. And I said to myself, I need to find out more about this.
And how about you Kate? What was the first piece you heard?
KM: This is a happy coincidence as it was also a London Sinfonietta recording. It was Carmen Arcadiae Mechanicae Perpetuum, that disc that also has Secret Theatre and Silbury Air on it. I was at McGill University in Montreal studying music. I was part of their contemporary music ensemble as
a clarinettist, which was brilliant but didn’t have anything to do with British contemporary music. We explored French musical connections, the American new music scene, as well as improvisation, which is really alive in Quebec.
JC: So how did Birtwistle fit with that?
KM: It was a fellow clarinettist who was curious about British new music. I was embarrassed as I didn’t know very much. ‘But what about Birtwistle?’ he said, and he played me Carmen. I suppose it was rather nostalgic for me because I was away from home and figuring out how I felt about being British. That moment framed my subsequent experiences of Birtwistle. I really
‘I THINK PERHAPS YOU’RE RIGHT: IN PUBLIC HE GAVE PEOPLE WHAT THEY EXPECTED OF A COMPOSER.’
liked what I heard: its earthiness, the soil, a sort of fibrousness, jaggedness. It reminded me of Bartók whom I’ve always loved deeply, not smoothing out the rough edges. And – as you said about Verses – hearing the theatre in it. It struck me as an ancient ritual. I’ve always loved myths and the rugged, rustic sense of theatre that ended up being essential to Birtwistle.
JC: It’s interesting, isn’t it, because Verses and Carmen are quite similar in many respects.
KM: Yes. And it’s fascinating what sticks. A very wise grandmother figure told me that when you meet the person who’s going to become really important to you, you know instantly what you’re going to love and what you’re going to hate about them. And it seemed to work the same for me with Birtwistle.
JC: Do you think you responded to this music as a clarinettist too?
KM: Yes, there’s something about the way he writes for instruments that’s very tactile: the
percussiveness, the physicality. I like the graininess of the clarinet and Birtwistle understands that.
JC: That’s what I like about his music too, its roughness. I remember once talking to him about Francis Bacon. He said he loved those flashes of colour on a Bacon canvas, occasional seemingly random brush strokes, which don’t belong yet at the same time do! There’s a kind of roughness there that spoke to Birtwistle. And I can hear that in the music too: sudden flashes of sound that burst out from somewhere unexpected.
KM: It adds a flamboyance, a grandness. I like it that the grubbiness and the grandeur can coexist.
JC: Yes, that grandness, those works on the large scale. You know just from the opening bars of a piece like Earth Dances that you’re in for a long ride. There’s not an obvious logic to the way the ideas unfold, and yet there’s a rightness about it when listening. You recognise you’re dealing with
very slow time – a music working in eons rather than minutes!
KM: How do you think his music will be viewed in a hundred years’ time?
JC: He was often asked that. And he would retort, ‘What’s the weather going to be like next week? I don’t know.’ Which is really the only right answer. He was composing for today not tomorrow. But it’s also true that many composers do drop off the radar when they die. That certainly happened with Tippett, didn’t it, though there’s renewed interest in him now.
KM: It raises the question of how much a composer’s status has to do with the establishment around them, the publishing networks and so on that are crucial in terms of sustaining them while they’re alive. Does that vanish with them?
JC: And in Birtwistle’s case having advocates like the London Sinfonietta programming his music was a great advantage. I’ve chatted to some of the long-standing
Sinfonietta players, people like violinist Joan Atherton and pianist John Constable, who were around for so much of the history of the Sinfonietta, and who speak very fondly about certain composers, Birtwistle among them. They loved playing his music. Responding to the challenges and the physicality of what they’re asked to do. John also speaks about Birtwistle as a composer who was on their side. He was very much a player’s composer, and that may be one of the reasons why the Sinfonietta worked with him so often – mutual respect.
KM: They both arrived on the scene together. The Sinfonietta was founded in 1968. I see parallels with young composers now who are working closely with certain ensembles and whose fortunes are growing together: Edmund Finnis and the Manchester Collective, Oliver Leith and Explore Ensemble, Cassandra Miller and the Bozzini Quartet. It’s a kind of symbiosis that was true for the Sinfonietta and Birtwistle too.
JC: Despite this, it’s surprising that his music hasn’t travelled so well, especially the operas. Take The Mask of Orpheus, his landmark work. It’s only ever had two productions in the same London theatre more than 30 years apart. Is there something peculiarly ‘British’ about Birtwistle’s music that makes it difficult to cross frontiers?
KM: Well, how many British composers have crossed those frontiers? Bachtrack recently published a survey of the top 10 living composers performed across the world in classical music concerts in 2022, and it’s fascinating to see three Brits among them: Thomas Adès, Anna Clyne and James MacMillan. What is it about these composers that makes them so playable? And how do their fortunes change? How is that, say, Vaughan Williams has become so beloved and untouchable in his status as a sort of icon of Englishness, and is it even fair? Wistfulness and stoicism and wholeness, the closeness to the land …
JC: … which clearly wasn’t true of the man! It’s the myth that’s grown up around him.
KM: Exactly. A pre-industrial Arcadia. Maybe it would be fairer to pin some of those things on Birtwistle?
JC: In many ways, of course, Harrison Birtwistle and Ralph Vaughan Williams are parallels: in touch with the landscape, English rituals and folk tales. Even when Birtwistle takes a more ‘universal’ tale like the Orpheus story he turns it into something very English.
KM: But it would require people to accept a very brutal kind of Englishness?
JC: Yes. The pastoral is not necessarily all fluffy sheep and fa-la-las.
KM: The violence of Punch and Judy and the mud under the fingernails. But what did ‘Englishness’ mean to him?
JC: I don’t know. I never spoke to him directly about that. Clearly a sense of place was important to him but that didn’t mean the big urban centres. He lived on the Isle of Raasay, in the heart of rural France, and then in Wiltshire.
KM: He had a persona that seems to chime with a self-image or caricature of Englishness, of Northernness, that is quite endearing: the doleful Lancastrian. I wonder how much that is wrapped up in people’s understanding of his place?
JC: I really admired that in him, someone who was from the ‘periphery’ rather than the ‘centre’. This wasn’t a London-based figure who’d been to an exclusive private school. He retained a regional accent throughout his life and didn’t really seem to care what people thought of what he did. Did he cultivate this gruff, Northern exterior? He’s never smiling in publicity photos. But in real life he grinned a lot, he told silly stories, and he loved good food and wine. I think perhaps you’re right: in public he gave people what they expected of a composer.
KM: He would always claim that what he did was simple, and that his methods were basic: always writing the same piece, just plotting a different route through the material. I found it hard to get through that claim of simplicity because when you listen to his
‘HE HAD A PERSONA THAT SEEMS TO CHIME WITH A SELF-IMAGE OR CARICATURE OF ENGLISHNESS, OF NORTHERNNESS, THAT IS QUITE ENDEARING…’
music it’s not true. I wonder if what will endure are the elements that first connected us both to his music – the rituals, the theatre, the earthy, the arcane, the things that feel much more ancient than they are?
JC: What we look for – and I hesitate to use this word – in ‘great’ art is surely something that takes us out of the mundane, out of our quotidian habits, and puts us somewhere else. And in the case of Birtwistle it’s that being in touch with what went before you and what comes afterwards. For me it’s like being in a vast mountain landscape where you sense your insignificance, physically and temporally, amidst something that’s been around for millennia. And there’s also the melancholic aspect to his music. He recognised this in himself, and it explains one of his obsessions: ‘Orpheus was a melancholic, and so am I’, he once said. That’s why he kept returning to him. With Birtwistle it’s like looking at the world in the half-light. I hear that in some of the more recent chamber music or the Moth Requiem. These are powerful melancholic works in the same way Dowland and late Schubert are. It puts you in touch with something beyond yourself that’s hard to articulate.
KM: Like Night’s Black Bird
JC: The Shadow of Night too.
KM: His returning continually to the figure of Orpheus is fascinating because Orpheus is no hero, is he? This is not a kind of hero complex. There’s a failure built into the way he treats his character, his foolishness, and the repeated obsession with screwing up every time.
‘I WONDER IF WHAT WILL ENDURE ARE THE ELEMENTS THAT FIRST CONNECTED US BOTH TO HIS MUSIC – THE RITUALS, THE THEATRE, THE EARTHY, THE ARCANE…?’Birtwistle in his studio in Wiltshire in 1997
JC: That’s true. Orpheus, Punch, the Minotaur, they’re all the same.
KM: His representation of maleness is a flawed one, then: damaged figures.
JC: Is he just looking in the mirror?
KM: Maybe! Didn’t he say that about keeping coming back to Orpheus? Because he shows us our own failings. It reminds me of a brilliant version of the Odyssey by Emily Wilson, the first woman to translate the Ancient Greek text into English. She speaks about why the translations that went before her would take for granted certain accepted versions of words that really change the way we understand the story. She translates the very first line not as ‘Goddess of song, teach me the story of a hero’ (as in the Oxford World Classics version) but rather ‘Tell me about a complicated man’. And so immediately she sets up both Odysseus and his journey as problematic. I understand Birtwistle’s Orpheus obsession in a similar way.
JC: Yes, Birtwistle doesn’t seem to see outside himself. Gawain sings in the eponymous opera, ‘I’m not that hero’, and in a sense, Birtwistle too is saying ‘I’m not that hero’, I’m not the heroic composer-figure you want me to be. I’m actually just working through issues for myself, time and again. That was what was so striking about Fiona Maddocks’s book about him, which gave a very different view of the composer: composing was difficult, a struggle.
KM: The fact that he allowed that book to be written was brave, because it also showed his vulnerabilities and uncertainties. Where’s our hero now?
JC: Heroic, no, but do you think Birtwistle was a radical? He was pushing at boundaries, but in many other ways he worked with familiar structures such as recitatives and arias, certain conventional kinds of theatrical representation, the relationship between music and text, and so on. Whereas many younger composers today are doing completely different things. They’ve moved beyond what we might call ‘high modernism’.
KM: It’s like Picasso: everything he touched was radical, but what he was touching was traditional stuff like paint and paper. He made it radical in the same way Birtwistle does with rhythm and repetition, and the tactile nature of an instrument, and a player just walking across the stage.
I’ve been thinking about Annea Lockwood, who was in England at the same time in the 1960s. She talked about making music in radical ways in part because she felt an outsider: as a New
Zealander, as a woman, she didn’t belong in the corridors of power. The infrastructure was so difficult to navigate, there was no point writing big orchestral pieces. She just went and did her own thing – burying pianos in the garden, and things like that. She adopted radicalism of necessity. Whereas Birtwistle didn’t ever seem to have to make those kinds of choices.
JC: And where does Birtwistle sit among the composers who remain with us? I’ve been immersing myself recently in Saariaho’s music, who has also become an established voice but in a different kind of tradition. Her music doesn’t sound at all like Birtwistle’s, yet they share that balancing of the radical – their sound worlds – and the conventional – their attitudes to nature.
KM: Yes, as we said earlier, using familiar materials to make us listen differently. The way that Saariaho uses technology is not about being radical; it’s about extending what’s possible.
JC: And in Birtwistle’s case he did what he did simply by means of the conventional 12-note scale, hidden away in his shed at the bottom of the garden, with the aid of the oldfashioned technology of a 2B pencil and a stack of manuscript paper. The alchemy of turning the ordinary into the extraordinary.
Jonathan Cross is Professor of Musicology at the University of Oxford, and author of Harrison Birtwistle: Man, Mind, Music (Faber, 2000)
Kate Molleson is a journalist and broadcaster, and author of Sound Within Sound (Faber, 2022)
‘IT’S LIKE PICASSO: EVERYTHING HE TOUCHED WAS RADICAL, BUT WHAT HE WAS TOUCHING WAS TRADITIONAL STUFF LIKE PAINT AND PAPER.’
12 Feb 1969
Queen Elizabeth Hall (QEH), London Verses for Ensembles
• World premiere & LS commission
• Conductor –David Atherton
26 Feb 1971
QEH, London Meridian
• World premiere & LS commission
• Conductor –David Atherton
18 Apr 1971
Oxford Prologue
• World premiere
9 Mar 1977
QEH, London Silbury Air
• World Premiere & LS commission
• Conductor –Elgar Howarth
24 Jan 1978
QEH, London Carmen Arcadiae Mechanicum Perpetuum
• World premiere
• Conductor –Harrison Birtwistle
4 Apr 1980
QEH, London Mercures (poses Plastiques)
• World premiere & LS co-commission
18 Oct 1984
QEH, London Secret Theatre and Songs by Myself
• World premiere & LS commission
• Conductor –David Atherton
1 Aug 1986
QEH, London Yan Tan Tethera
• World premiere
• Conductor –Elgar Howarth
24 Jan 1988
Royal Festival Hall (RFH), London
Four Songs of Autumn
• World premiere & LS commission
4 May 1988
QEH, London An die Musik
• World premiere
• Conductor –Harrison Birtwistle
6 May 1990
Royal Opera House, London Ritual Fragment
• World premiere & LS commission
19 Jun 1991
Snape Maltings, UK
Four Poems by Jaan Kaplinski
• World premiere
• Conductor –Harrison Birtwistle
26 Apr 1996
QEH, London Slow Frieze, for piano and ensemble
• World Premiere & LS commission
• Conductor –Markus Stenz
5 May 1996
QEH, London Bach Measures
• World Premiere
• Conductor –Diego Masson
22 May 1999
QEH, London The Silk House Antiphonies
• World premiere
• Conductor –Oliver Knussen
11 May 2000
Tate Modern, London
17 Tate Riffs
• World premiere
• Conductor –Martyn Brabbins
• The Queen was present 14 Oct 2000
QEH, London Slow Frieze
• World Premiere of new version
• Conductor –Martyn Brabbins
2 Dec 2003
QEH, London Theseus Game
• UK Premiere & LS commission
6 Sep 2008
Turin Conservatoire, Italy
Virelai
• World Premiere
12 Jun 2009
QEH, London Semper Downland and The Corridor
05 Sep 2011
Teatro Dal Verme, Turin, Italy
In Broken Images
• World premiere & LS commission
12 Jun 2015
Snape Maltings The Cure
• World premiere & LS co-commission
18 Jun 2005
Snape Maltings Neruda Madigales
• World Premiere & LS co-commission
• Conductor –Nicholas Kok
• Conductor –Pierre-Andre Valade 11 Jun 2007
RFH, London Cortège
• World premiere
• Conductor –Elgar Howarth
2 Dec 2008
QEH, London The Message (Duet 1)
• World Premiere & LS Commission
• World premiere
• Conductor – Ryan Wigglesworth
25 Nov 2009
The Warehouse, London Bourdon (Duet 2)
• World premiere & LS commission
20 Aug 2011
Cadogan Hall, London Angel Fighter
• UK premiere
• Conductor –David Atherton
• Conductor –David Atherton
5 Dec 2014
QEH, London Violute (Duet 4) & Echo (Duet 5)
• World premiere & LS co-commission
• Conductor –Geoffrey Paterson
2016
St John’s Smith Square, London
Five Lessons in a Frame
• World premiere & LS co-commission
• Conductor –Martyn Brabbins
THERE HAVE ONLY BEEN TWO YEARS IN OUR HISTORY WHERE WE HAVE NOT PLAYED BIRTWISTLE: – 1968
(THE YEAR WE WERE FOUNDED)
– 1993
Spain (4 performances)
Portugal (4 performances)
Canada (4 performances)
Mexico (3 performances)
Finland (3 performances)
Australia (3 performances)
Argentina (3 performances)
Russia (2 performances)
Slovakia (1 performance)
Norway (1 performance)
Hungary (1 performance)
Greece (1 performance)
Denmark (1 performance)
Czech Republic (1 performance)
Croatia (1 performance)
China (1 performance)
Belgium (1 performance)
Armenia (1 performance)
6 USA
8 NETHERLANDS
14 FRANCE
Silbury Air 9 Mar 1977
Carmen Arcadiae Mechanicae Perpetuum 24 Jan 1978
Mercure – Poses plastiques 4 Apr 1980
Secret Theatre 18 Oct 1984
Songs by Myself 18 Oct 1984
Four Songs of Autumn 24 Jan 1988
Ritual Fragment 6 May 1990
Slow Frieze 26 Apr 1996
Bach Measures 4 May 1996
Theseus Game 19 Sep 2003
244 UK 20 GERMANY
55 ITALY
5 SWEDEN
8 POLAND
8 AUSTRIA 6 JAPAN
WE HAVE PERFORMED BIRTWISTLE IN 28 COUNTRIES
Neruda Madrigales 18 Jun 2005
The Message (Duet 1) 2 Dec 2008
Bourdon (Duet 2) 25 Nov 2009
Duet 3 9 Sep 2010
In Broken Images 5 Sep 2011
Duet 4 (Violute) 5 Dec 2014
Duet 5 (Echo) 5 Dec 2014
The Cure (partner piece to The Corridor) 1 Jun 2015
5 Lessons in a Frame 1 Jun 2016
This list includes co-commissions with other ensembles and organisations
Dylan Thomas
HB’s ancestors can be clearly traced back for centuries, having all been firmly rooted in the vicinity of Huncoat, a small town just outside Accrington. At the age of seventeen, Harry’s father, Fred, joined the East Lancashire Regiment, enduring the Gallipoli campaign and the horrors of trench warfare in Northern France. At some point in the 1920s, his mother, Madge (née Harrison), was sent at an early age to live with her uncle who ran the post office in Hampton Hill. Coincidentally, this was just a stone’s throw from where the three of us were eventually to grow up in Twickenham.
Some years after Fred and Madge married, they decided to leave the industrial landscape and confined terraces of Oswaldtwistle, where they ran a bakery, to become farmers. Their only child, Harry, was about seven years old when they moved, and for him it was a hugely significant moment. His new surroundings were a pastoral idyll. Remembering that time, he had fond memories of his dog, “Urk” (Hercules), and a pony named Bobby, and he spoke of hummingbirds, butterflies, corncrakes and woodpeckers. There was a small reservoir full of fish that fed a brook through a wooded valley, leading to the remains of ‘Hapton castle’, (originally bequeathed to an old ancestor, Reyner de Birtwistle, by King John in 1209). Once there was a small hamlet called Birtwistle, which had long disappeared, but amazingly has recently been found. HB got to know his new playground intimately, and often mentioned the hiding places he found when playing truant from school.
At some point in the early 1950s, industrialisation started creeping closer to this Arcadia, most dramatically when two enormous cooling towers were built almost in the next field. It would be easy to over-romanticise all of this and to speculate what effect, if any, it had on the art of HB. Nonetheless, he often described his music as landscapes that were punctuated with unexpected objects, or intruders, just like the cooling towers, and just to sprinkle the tale with some fairydust, he also mentioned to us that the small valley he could disappear in as a sort private playground, was in fact the reason why he wrote music.
Adam, Silas, Toby Birtwistle
Sir Harrison Birtwistle’s sons
It was an immense honour to be able to call Harry a close friend and professional colleague; it’s therefore with the deepest regret that I’m unable to be with you all this evening to celebrate the remarkable relationship between Harry and the Sinfonietta, a symbiotic association that endured and prospered for more than half a century.
Both fairly blunt-speaking Lancastrians, some of our formative years were spent playing clarinet together in the Lancashire County Youth Orchestra, he a budding professional, I…well, as Tony Pay once remarked, “although a good technician, (he) never really learnt how to blow it properly”!
Our paths would cross again when, at Cambridge University, I directed Harry’s Tragoedia, a fabulous early trial balloon for his opera Punch and Judy, the first performance of which I conducted with the phenomenal English Opera Group at the Aldeburgh Festival in 1968. During eight weeks of incredibly intense rehearsals for Punch, Harry and I “clicked”, his precocious genius infecting everyone around him. His sardonic humour, laced with affection and a deadpan smile, masked a deeply serious composer who knew exactly what he wanted and was often justifiably irritable when we fell short. Back in the 60s stories abounded of his discontented experiences working with large symphony orchestras who found the complexities of his music too much to comprehend, and the technical demands too outrageous. At Aldeburgh, with a long rehearsal period in an idyllic setting and with a small-knit group of singers, players and a production team headed by my great friend, the late Paul Findlay, a founding director of the Sinfonietta, we were able to forge a focused, intense ‘family’ spirit.
Five months earlier Nicholas Snowman’s and my baby, the Sinfonietta, was born, its inaugural concert containing the premiere of John Tavener’s The Whale. John’s work and the Sinfonietta’s formation created quite a stir amongst the national press; this intrigued Harry. I asked him if he’d consider writing a new work, promising a similar ‘family’ spirit to the one we were experiencing at Aldeburgh. My suggestions: no restrictions on orchestration, a substantial work that would be the programme’s main focus and a showcase for instrumental virtuosity. The result, a masterpiece: Verses for Ensembles, an exceptionally influential work that was undoubtedly the major highlight of the Sinfonietta’s second season and the centrepiece of this evening’s concert.
Much, much more was to follow Verses; it became the first in a long line of commissions from the Sinfonietta, and the beginning of an astonishing partnership that would last a lifetime.
My friend Harry was inspiring, yet unforgiving; plentiful with praise whilst being enormously critical; and, above all, showed his genuine gratitude to everyone involved despite never appearing completely satisfied. What a privilege it has been to be trusted and involved with so many wonderful creations. Harry, we miss you.
David Atherton obe Conductor & co-founder of the London SinfoniettaIn recent weeks much has been written by many of us concerning Harry, the extraordinary, amazingly original and vital composer. In addition to these thoughts and tributes I have personally been recalling the sheer pleasure and rich experiences of being with Harry on visits abroad.
I was privileged to be invited by Harry in recent years to accompany him to Porto and Berlin on the occasion of performances of his works. In the wonderful Casa da Música designed by Rem Koolhaas, Ryan Wigglesworth and the Orquestra Nacional do Porto gave wonderful performances of Night’s Black Bird and our evenings in that lovely city would end up with Harry, Ryan and myself relishing malt whisky and memorable conversations and friendship.
An equally relaxed and delightful Harry was present in Berlin where Robin Ticciati also memorably conducted Night’s Black Bird.
In the 1980s Margo and I had accompanied Harry and Sheila to a remarkable Ring cycle in Bayreuth led by Daniel Barenboim and Harry Kupfer. Relatively recently, a propos of nothing, Harry suggested we return to Bayreuth, on this occasion for a distinctly bizarre production of the Ring but which was wonderfully conducted by Kirill Petrenko to whom Harry was introduced by Eva Wagner. I remember Harry’s surprise at meeting a jean clad, youthful quite diminutive figure emerging from the celebrated pit.
I hope the photos give some idea of the happy, relaxed atmosphere Harry on tour always created.
Ifirst met Harry in 1968 when the London Sinfonietta invited him to write a substantial piece for whatever instruments he wanted to employ. The work that emerged was Verses for Ensembles, the first of many memorable pieces that Harry wrote for the Sinfonietta over subsequent decades. Verses turned out to be a masterwork and very challenging technically. David Atherton, a stickler for quality, quite rightly specified that only top players should be engaged, and he understandably required numerous sectional and tutti rehearsals to do the piece justice. In those days it took much longer for musicians to master the difficulties such complex contemporary scores presented.
At the time, David, Nicholas Snowman, Tony Pay and I shared a small house in north London, the hub from where things were organised. It was a kind of cottage industry. I remember there was no heating in the house, so as much time as possible was spent planning the concerts at Luigi’s, a local Italian restaurant where a decent three-course set menu cost ten and six. Most of the musicians on David’s list played for different London orchestras, so it was quite a problem to organise the rehearsals around the players’ limited availability. For this purpose, we made use of an early form of manual spreadsheet which indicated the times and dates when each player was free. The schedule was finally agreed upon and the concert took place on 12 February 1969 to much acclaim. As I recall, the players on that occasion included Judith Pearce (flute), Derek Wickens (oboe), Antony Pay (clarinet), Martin Gatt (bassoon), Barry Tuckwell (horn), Elgar Howarth (trumpet), John Iveson (trombone), and the cream of London’s percussion fraternity. Fortunately for us, these accomplished musicians were keen to work with David and to master the problems involved. The result was a magnificent performance of this exciting and exacting composition.
We had a lot of fun in those early days, even though we were never quite sure how things would turn out. After more than 50 years of concert giving by the Sinfonietta, I guess they turned out all right, not least thanks to the many outstanding works written for the group by Harry and other major figures.
Andrew Rosner
Harrison Birtwistle’s long-serving manager
Harry’s music and creative life are inextricably and joyously connected to the London Sinfonietta. To perform an evening of the great man’s music together is both inspiring and humbling.
When I reflect on the many Birtwistle Conducting journeys I have experienced, I realise that they have actually been veritable expeditions of discovery, not mere journeys. Often with no road map, and certainly nothing akin to a pocket guide!
Such expeditions are serious undertakings. Each piece I have worked on has certainly shared characteristic Birtwistle fingerprints, but at the same time, these shared traits are far outweighed by the sense of creative renewal and exploration that this most original of composers presents. Embarking on a Birtwistle expedition perhaps compares to a mountaineer preparing to tackle an unconquered peak. And if the preparation is inadequate or doesn’t embrace a sense of discovery, then, given the challenges of unmarked routes and awkward terrain, the summit will prove elusive.
Harry’s connection with the Academy began with his short period of postgraduate study as a clarinet student in the late 1950s. The association wasn’t seamless: after decades when his involvement was minimal – in the 1960s, 1970s and 1980s – we then witnessed a sudden and remarkable surge of teaching, workshops, mentoring, concerts, recordings and collaborations from 1995 until his death. Harry also offered peerless advice to the institution, particularly when the Academy was moving from a place where contemporary music was neatly packaged in a series of annual festivals (admittedly with some stunning results with the likes of Ligeti, Berio, Henze and Messiaen in situ) to being part of the mainstream and our ‘daily bread’.
As ever with his visiting teaching role, Harry always visibly entered the building ‘glass half empty’: ‘I haven’t a clue what I’m going to say to this lot. How you compose is one of the things you can’t really talk about.’ You could tell he didn’t completely believe that. It was a conceit of grim granite we learned to adore, a default against the danger of over buttering the parsnips. Two hours later Harry had opened the eyes, ears and minds of a group of composers, not so much in practical guidance to their own creative muse, but more what it meant to be an artist and how the observation of life and living has to be at the heart of every note penned. He raised the stakes to the point at which students realised that for all the professional challenges of being a composer, the vocation was a deeply serious matter for the human spirit.
It just happened that Harry’s emergence coincided with the founding of the Academy’s record label and the first task was for Sebastian Bell, Head of Woodwind and long of this London Sinfonietta parish, and me, to produce a disc including Harry’s first piece (composed at the Academy) Refrains and Choruses, as well as Grimethorpe Aria and, soon after, with our Head of Brass John Wallace, a recording of the world-premiere Tate Riffs, composed for the opening of Tate Modern.
‘I HAVEN’T A CLUE WHAT I’M GOING TO SAY TO THIS LOT. HOW YOU COMPOSE IS ONE OF THE THINGS YOU CAN’T REALLY TALK ABOUT.’
I have been fortunate to conduct several of Harry’s operas, most recently The Last Supper in 2018, and The Mask of Orpheus in 2019. The Last Supper was in Glasgow with the BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra and a wonderful cast headed up by Roddy Williams. Unforgettable was the day I spent filming an interview with Harry at the Silk House. His thoughts and ideas were eloquently and inimitably expressed, and he was a generous and welcoming host. Harry’s magnificent quince tree took a starring role in the film, and the jelly I made from the fruit Harry gave me was divine!
I was so proud to be able to bring The Mask of Orpheus back to the ENO stage in 2019, and it was such a privilege to spend time with Harry in the Coliseum, and to witness the heartfelt thanks he expressed to the company before the dress rehearsal.
Harry was a giant of a composer, and long may the Birtwistle summits continue to be conquered.
Martyn BrabbinsThis was the spark that led to a series of Birtwistle performances which peppered the Manson Ensemble and the Symphony Orchestra’s programmes for the next two decades. It feels invidious to pick any out, but there are several that continue to have a special resonance. I won’t forget a concert of Secret Theatre, Silbury Air and Cortège – a monster programme, and that was in the same year one of our finest wind quintets performed Five Distances in a pre-Prom concert from memory. Harry simply could not believe his eyes and ears; he always made a point of expressing pride that young players could now ‘eat his music for breakfast’, like seasoned professionals. Indeed, in the memorable celebration day at Plush this summer, several who had performed in the premiere of Secret Theatre said just the same as Ryan Wigglesworth was leading an assembled group through the same piece.
We felt proud that the Academy performed the third outing of Exody after the Chicago and BBC Symphony performances. Harry rather indiscreetly said that the Academy orchestra had learnt it faster than the CSO! We also regularly took Harry’s music to Aldeburgh and when Oliver Knussen was appointed Richard Rodney Bennett Professor at the Academy for those magical five years before his death, Harry’s music acted as its own refrain throughout Olly’s programmes with Manson. Finally, I must mention the generosity with which Harry composed the music for the opening of the Susie Sainsbury Theatre in 2018. Unsurprisingly the score made demands on our brass players and no less on our percussion department as a large number of bells were required! Harry refused payment and instead willingly accepted a case of Pomerol, of course from a year he recognised. The last time I saw Harry he was at the Garrick bar with my close Academy colleague Timothy Jones. Greeting him, I asked what he was doing there. ‘I’m going off to the Barbican to hear a piece of mine Simon’s doing’. I asked him to remind me what piece it was. ‘I can’t remember’, he answered, before taking a final slug of whisky and shuffling on his way, wrapped in one of his memorable shawls, to the closest taxi.
Professor Jonathan Freeman-Attwood cbe Principal of the Royal Academy of Music
A glance through the Harrison Birtwistle catalogue informs us that one of the soloists in the first performance of Nenia: The Death of Orpheus (1970) was a young pianist called Paul Crossley, then only in his second professional season. I can’t remember a time in my career when I didn’t know Harry or his music, nor when we were not a part of the same shared project. So – how to choose from 50 years of memories? I was helped by a friend, someone absolutely unconnected with the musical word, who suggested ‘make it very personal, tell me about your favourite piece (or pieces) and why you like them so much’, and, she added, ‘tell me something affectionate about him’.
My favourites, perhaps because I know them best, but also because I think they are him at his best, are his London Sinfonietta pieces, in particular Silbury Air and Ritual Fragment. The first thing to say is that he is one of the great originals. Though I can spot an occasional influence, his music simply does not ever sound like any other, but it does always sound like him. Pieces often start with a note, a rhythm, a texture, a ‘splurge’ one might almost say, which is then ‘let go’, and left to find its way. Silbury Air starts with the note E. No matter how many times I have listened to it – the sounds familiar, the landmarks well-known – the journey is never the same. Everything seems in a permanent state of exposition, unconnected, not dissolving or solidifying. I am still never precisely sure where I am going next. This is probably not easy for some, but for me it is exciting. The word is, possibly, beguiling, but not in the sense of ‘being taken for a ride’. There’s no faking with Harry. So, the journey is always fresh, and the going itself is what it is, always, at each hearing, unique in its trajectory.
Ritual Fragment leads me to describe the first of two occasions on which I saw Harry radiantly happy. The piece was his spontaneous, unsolicited, tribute to Michael Vyner, his friend and the long-time Artistic Director of the London Sinfonietta. It is an extraordinary work of communion – of thanks, memory, and sharing. After its dress rehearsal on a wonderful spring morning everybody involved – he, all the players, me – came back to my house for lunch. Old experienced hands we might have been, but we all knew we’d just heard a blazing masterpiece. And, most importantly, Harry knew it too – he was almost bursting. It was such a joyous occasion and as wonderful a tribute, in its own way, as Michael could have wished for.
Some years later Harry and his beloved wife Sheila came to stay with me and my partner John in our holiday home on Lanzarote. Sheila was already very ill, but the moment they arrived our island exerted its magic and, miraculously Sheila went into total remission. We have one extraordinary beach where it seems you can almost walk out into the sea itself. To remember Harry and Sheila doing just that, hand in hand, as happy as young newlyweds, brings tears to my eyes even as I write it.
‘…HIS MUSIC SIMPLY DOES NOT EVER SOUND LIKE ANY OTHER, BUT IT DOES ALWAYS SOUND LIKE HIM.’
We all had a lot of fun during that time and I would like to end with a reminiscence of Harry and I, just the two of us, taking a walk one day. I’m sure we had lots of serious talk, but suddenly we started remembering our early upbringing – his in Accrington, Lancashire, mine in Dewsbury, Yorkshire. We started exchanging ‘northernisms’ from our grandparents’ generation – we could both still do the accents very well! One of his was ‘you know, us northerners – we like to keep ourselves to ourselves’. As Harry said, ‘I don’t think we’d have been their greatest shining examples, would we’? One of mine was –when we were naughty – ‘if you’re not right good very soon you’ll be shown a thing or two’.
Well, Harry, I have to say, I think you were ‘right good very soon’ and I know we’ve been ‘shown a thing or two’.
Thank you, my friend.
Paul Crossley Pianist and London Sinfonietta Artistic Director from 1988 to 1994Over the last five decades the London Sinfonietta has collaborated with an illustrious list of composers from across the world though, perhaps more than anybody, Birtwistle was the Sinfonietta composer. He penned score after score for the ensemble, and his relationship with the players was close and hugely productive.
Something of a paradox resides at the heart of Birtwistle’s output. While post-war modernism provided its technical foundation, the sound of his music evokes much older imagery – medieval English ceremony, archaic Attic ritual, even the passage of geological time. His extraordinary gift was to forge a sonic vision from material which was resolutely contemporary but, through the alchemy of his imagination, appears simultaneously ancient and timeless.
And the sound is highly distinctive, with its dark and crunchy textures and bracing rhythmic vigour. The dynamism of his structures, where terraced strata interact and mutate along perpetually unpredictable paths, also gives the music huge dramatic momentum.
On a personal level – once the ice broke – Harry was the sweetest of men, full of humour and the source of endlessly fascinating, original and memorable conversation. It was a privilege to know him and I will miss him very deeply.
Sir George Benjamin ComposerI worked for the London Sinfonietta twice: first, in the 1980s and early 1990s running the education programme and then, between 1998 and 2006 as Artistic Director with Cathy Graham as Managing Director. To work for the Sinfonietta was to work with Harry. We were, very happily, his band. I also worked closely with him when I moved to Southbank Centre, helping create festivals and originate commissions. From my mid 20s I was privileged to sit in rehearsal and hear the first sounds of so many of his works, from Secret Theatre to Yan Tan Tethera to Theseus Game to the very late Intrada for Piano and Percussion
Harry once said, ‘the notion of how you look as opposed to how you listen has always been of great importance to me’. Clearly, he was a man of the theatre, from his days as Music Director at the National Theatre to his big operas. But his instrumental music also has a kind of simple, ritualised theatre to it. In Secret Theatre if you are playing the melody you stand on one side of the stage; if you’re playing the accompaniment, you stand on the other; you walk between the two according to the kind of music you’re playing. In Ritual Fragment, a tribute to the Sinfonietta’s late Artistic Director Michael Vyner and later developed as Cortège, each musician walks out of the accompanying ensemble to play their melodic tribute, to lay a purely musical wreath in honour. Watching Harry in rehearsal was like watching a theatre director, with as much to say about how the performance looked as how it sounded.
I took Harry into a secondary school in South East London as part of an education programme. I thought that the composing work we were doing with the kids was innovative, but it turned out that he’d done it all decades before. When he was teaching music at Cranborne Chase girls’ school in the early 1960s, he got the girls to compose their own music in groups. ‘I asked them to make music as if music had never existed before,’ he told me, ‘to invent music itself. This was all that I could think of to do with them, but it’s been the most important idea in my music ever since’.
It’s unsurprising that Harry was obsessed with the myth of Orpheus, the inventor of music. Just like he invited those teenagers to imagine the first music that ever existed, his own pieces seem to set out to invent music from scratch: the breathing sounds which begin his huge opera The Mask of Orpheus; or the ticking pulse on the E note which opens Silbury Air, out of which the lines of the music break and swell and grow upwards and outwards to fill the musical space; or the deep seismic roar which begins Earth Dances. All of these sound, to me, like plausible contenders for the very beginning of music.
Since Harry’s death in April 2022, I’ve been caught off guard a number of times by how much his music haunts and moves me: the flute melody that wafts over the opening of Secret Theatre like a line drawn in the air, the huge spaces at the end of The Mask of Orpheus, the monumentality of Earth Dances or the delicate sadness of The Moth Requiem. Even the snatch of Panic they played on the BBC news the day he died to illustrate the shock/scandal factor of his music was one of those long, high, sad Birtwistle tunes with machines twittering around it, and despite the commentary urging me to think otherwise, at that moment I just heard it as Harry’s particularly English version of melancholy. It went straight to my heart.
‘WATCHING HARRY IN REHEARSAL WAS LIKE WATCHING A THEATRE DIRECTOR.’
Knowing Harry made life more vivid: going to an exhibition with him and seeing it through his eyes, talking about his garden or the mix of paint colours in his house, or about poetry or films and TV, about Machaut or Messiaen or Whitney Houston and, especially, about food; cooking, recipes, ingredients. He had impeccable, simple taste in many things and his hard-working creative soul was big enough to encompass areas of life way beyond music. He is much missed.
Gillian Moore cbe Former Artistic Director of the London SinfoniettaThere is no more important a composer in the history and life of the London Sinfonietta than Harrison Birtwistle, who wrote so many pieces for the ensemble over nearly half a century.
I first met Harry when I was working for the Sinfonietta in the 1970s. I remember those fantastic works, among them Silbury Air, Secret Theatre and CAMP, which were thrilling to hear, and sometimes at the outset a bit too thrilling to play! In those early days performances were often conducted with phenomenal skill and flair by David Atherton and also Elgar Howarth, who, later, was to conduct several of the operas. I was working with dear friend and colleague Michael Vyner, still much missed, who was very close to Harry and shared his celebrated culinary interests too.
At Glyndebourne I had the huge privilege to commission two operas from Harry, and he also gave us a fanfare to open the new theatre in 1994. The Second Mrs Kong (what a title) celebrated the vastly improved technical and acoustic facilities of the new House, a work genuinely funny as well as profound which cries out for revival. And then, in association with the Deutsche Staatsoper Berlin, The Last Supper, a piece for the Millenium, surprising as a subject perhaps, but Harry said the Millenium was nothing but the marking of two thousand years since Christ. This was no Christian treatise, but a reflection on human history over the following two millennia.
Harry’s achievements include works which are universally recognised as masterpieces, because they communicate at some almost, but not quite, unfathomable level, and so move us deeply. Thank goodness we have them for ever, and thank goodness for the essential existence of the Sinfonietta, who quite simply have always provided the benchmark of quality in their performances of his works.
Anthony Whitworth-Jones General Director at Glyndebourne and former Administrative Director of the London SinfoniettaIwas aware from the moment I joined the London Sinfonietta that the relationship between Harry and the ensemble was a special one, forged over many years. Looking at the commissions between 1967 and 1997 I’m reminded again that it was the London Sinfonietta that brought into the world many of the best-known and best-loved of his ensemble pieces. The commissioning continued when I was Managing Director and Gillian Moore Artistic Director, with the magnificent Theseus Game and Neruda Madrigales, and I have happy memories from those years of taking his music to many places. Buenos Aires, Madrid, Hamburg, Krakow, Lisbon, Prague and Sydney spring immediately to mind though I know there were many more. But my warmest memories are from the times I spent with him, often during rehearsals for concerts of his music. His was the warmest gruffness I had ever experienced, and I loved him for it.
Among those memories one particular adventure comes to mind, and that is the journey towards the opening of Tate Modern in 2000. Harry had been commissioned to write an opening fanfare which would be performed as the Queen walked through the Turbine Hall to officially open the magnificently reconfigured Bankside Power Station. The London Sinfonietta was at that time local to the gestating Tate Modern – our offices were in Southwark Street directly behind – and it felt natural on every level that the ensemble should be the performers.
It’s remarkable how the Turbine Hall has become such a familiar fixture for the country’s art lovers over the last 20 odd years, and easy to forget the overwhelming impact the space had on those viewing it for the first time in May 2000. Harry had worked closely with Ian Dearden of Sound Intermedia on creating a work which would fill that enormous space on the opening morning of 11 May. 17 Tate Riffs consisted of a background of taped drones, created from the sounds of barges, and recorded birdsong which framed the fanfare itself performed by five groups of three musicians – flutes, oboes, clarinets, trumpets and marimbas – placed around the hall. Originally Harry had wanted to use live hooters from barges moored in the Thames (a progress report by Ian Dearden in October 1999: “I thought it was time to give you an update on Ron and his hooters”) but this proved impossible. All the musicians were miked with the sound being delayed and the riffs thrown around the space. Contact with conductor Martyn Brabbins was by monitors.
It was with great sadness that I heard that Harry has died. I remember taking part in so many performances with the Sinfonietta, particularly of the marvellous Silbury Air and Secret Theatre all round the world and of course so many premieres. I think the greatest concert of his music we did was at Snape conducted by Elgar Howarth who conducted so much of his music including all his superb operas, in the interval Harry gave a fascinating interview in which he rather wickedly pretended to forget the names of some famous musicians, very Harry! He will be greatly missed but there is a wonderful store of music for us to listen to.
John Constable Principal Pianist of the London Sinfonietta 1968-2017This was obviously not going to be the simplest of gigs to rehearse, and the Queen was due to arrive at 11am. So we were called for 7am to clear security in time for an 8am start. I remember so well waiting to be called for the rehearsal. It was cold, it was very early, it was quite daunting, and it was very exciting. And there we all stood, surrounding Harry, his “Birtwistle Band”, which was the name he blessed the ensemble with that morning. Ever since, that has for me been the London Sinfonietta’s other name. We rehearsed – with someone standing in for the Queen making stately progress through the hall (in the event the Queen herself was very spritely and was able to stand and listen to the music for a while at the other end….) – until the moment arrived. The magnificent fanfare commenced with John Wallace’s first exposed notes and Tate Modern was opened and history made by Harry and his Band, the music interacting with the vast space.
Seven years later I left the London Sinfonietta to take up post as Director Music at the British Council. The first time I saw Harry after it had been announced was at a reception. He looked at me. ‘Traitor’ he said. In the kindest possible way. We had bonded many years previously over black pudding and discussions around the best way to char aubergine. He enriched my life enormously, and happily at the British Council the relationship did continue. There was support for the release of a recording of the original quadraphonic version of Chronometer, the master of which was thought to be lost at the time. We supported the major festival of British Music at the Casa da Música in Porto where Harry was guest composer. And I remember the thrill of introducing opera producers and directors from around the world to The Corridor and The Cure at the Linbury Theatre, Royal Opera House, and to Harry himself interviewed by Tom Service the following morning. I like to think the traitor done good. His presence – so strong, often silent, never wasting a word – is something I feel still. And though I miss him, it will remain with me. RIP Harry, and thank you.
Cathy Graham obe Managing Director of the London Sinfonietta 1997 to 2006My first experience, I think, of Harry’s music was playing in the first performance of Secret Theatre. I’d not before been faced with music of such rhythmic complexity, dramatic power and utter originality. Over the decades the fascination his music had for me has never waned and the experience more recently, of working closely with him on the two chamber operas, The Corridor and The Cure, remains one of the most rewarding experiences of my musical life.
Paul Silverthorne Principal Viola of the London Sinfonietta 1988-presentIn 1975 Michael Vyner, at that time artistic director of the London Sinfonietta, invited me to become a member of the ensemble. The following years were frantically busy and full of vivid musical experiences. Possibly the most important – certainly the most memorable for me – were the three compositions Michael commissioned from Harry Birtwistle. The first, two years after I’d joined, was Silbury Air, a mysteriously beautiful work, full of pulse games that lent it a restless atmosphere, constantly shifting but always flowing with an inner logic. A couple of years later, Carmen Arcadiae Mechanicum Perpetuum (its acronym surely a mischievous jest at the commissioner’s expense) was an altogether different beast, angular and impish, characterised by abrupt stops and starts and changes of direction. The third, Secret Theatre, with its rhythmic mobiles and keening chorales, is harder to summarise. Suffice it to say that Harry promised to write us a really hard piece. He didn’t disappoint. These three works were a constant feature in a decade or more of touring programmes. Then in 1990 came a fourth composition. Michael had passed away in 1989, a victim of the dreadful scourge of AIDS. Harry’s response, premiered at the memorial concert held the following year at the Royal Opera House, was Ritual Fragment.
The concept of Ritual Fragment was essential Harry, combining drama and theatricality, with the added frisson that it was unconducted. It was scored for the core ensemble membership of fourteen: a continuo group of ‘cello, bass and piano; ten players providing a kaleidoscopic chorus whilst also taking turns to weave a continuous chain of solos; and a prominently positioned bass drum, whose ominous tolling rhythmic figure marked the passing stages of the music. The ten chorus members/soloists were divided into two arcs of five, placed on opposite sides of the stage. A solitary music stand at the front held a score containing all the solo parts. The theatrical action – the ‘Ritual’ of the title – unfolded during the series of solos, when each of the ten players moved to the front to deliver their solo and then crossed to the opposite side of the stage to take the seat vacated by the following soloist. At the end of the sequence the seating had thus become a mirror image of its original formation. As a coda, the flute player led a brief recap of the ten solos and the music wound to a close.
Harry explained that his idea for the piece – besides its dedication to Michael Vyner’s memory – was that it was composed for us, the members of the ensemble whom Michael had assembled to form the London Sinfonietta. It was a composition of which we could take ownership, a rare and special gift in a genre that most often requires the direction of a skilled and sympathetic conductor. The solos were written with the individual members in mind –miniature character sketches, if you like. In my own case, this was evidenced by the fact that he scored not for the trombone, but the bass trumpet, an instrument for which I was a passionate, if generally unsuccessful advocate.
Examples abound of similar instances where Harry wrote with specific artists in mind. A handful that springs to mind: the role of the Minotaur for John Tomlinson; the solo roles in Panic for John Harle and Paul Clarvis; Orpheus Elegies for (my wife) Melinda Maxwell and Helen Tunstall, with a later addition for his favourite counter tenor, Andrew Watts; Duet for Eight Strings for Laurence Power and Adrian Brendel. These are not necessarily the high and mighty of the music business (though some are) but performers with whom Harry had forged a close rapport. I’m sure colleagues could offer other such names.
I’ll end with a rather trivial example. As a gift for Melinda’s 60th birthday and my retirement, he wrote us a duet – still awaiting its premiere – for trombone and oboe (see below).
Harry was a great friend as much as a great and original composer. Conversation with him could be funny as well as serious. He was generous, surprising and insightful. Meals shared – after concerts, on tour, at his home in Wiltshire – were always memorable occasions. He was a man who touched many of us deeply. Of course, we miss him.
David PurserLondon Sinfonietta Principal Trombone 1975-2009
In the early 90s I was preparing a performance of Harry’s Verses for clarinet and piano. It’s a short suite of delicate, restrained miniatures which couldn’t be more different from the extrovert Verses for Ensembles in tonight’s programme. I wanted the pieces to sound as beautiful as they possibly could, and I polished the interpretation into something close to a Chopin Nocturne. At the rehearsal, we’d been playing for less than half a minute when Harry interrupted. ‘Noo, noo, noo. Where did all this phraaaising cooome from? I didn’t write that! Just play the nootes, then stop’. Oops. I learnt an important lesson from Harry that day: play what a piece of music is, not what you want it to be. It’s a view I’ve tried to apply in playing and teaching ever since.
Mark van de Wiel
Principal Clarinet, London Sinfonietta 2002-present
‘HE WAS GENEROUS, SURPRISING AND INSIGHTFUL.’Score of Birtwistle’s duet for David Purser and Melinda Maxwell
As Harry Birtwistle’s editor at his publisher Boosey & Hawkes for nearly 20 years I was privileged to be the first recipient of his new musical children. I acted midwife as we together honed his manuscript into performable material, striving to accurately convey his intentions as clearly as possible for the players – whether it was a solo instrumental piece or the marathon opera The Minotaur
Receipt would have been preceded by weeks, or months, of Harry’s inimitable phone calls –maybe a specific instrumental or notational question troubling him, or a warning that a piece had ‘millions of notes – it’ll give you a nightmare’. But sometimes the friendly call was less specific: ‘I’m calling for information, but I’ve forgotten what I wanted to ask’!
One of the joys, and challenges, was his unending imagination. Every piece was the fruit of a new idea, a new concept, or a new way through previously visited ideas – a different route out of his ‘labyrinth’. Editing was never routine, as each new manuscript threw up different complications to be worked through, puzzles to be solved.
Harry had an innate sense of theatre. The score was often spatially imagined – in groups on the stage, or soloists coming to the fore, and initially I needed to familiarise myself with the shape of the landscape, the blocks or independent floating strands. It was important not to disregard his manuscript layout which might be a representation of the drama; for instance, the flute might well move down the score to meet the soloist, just as he walks forward on stage. But then sometimes this was not the intention at all – the arrangement of instruments on the page merely reflected the order he had thought of the changing layers, as I was to find in his large orchestral piece Deep Time when the ordering on each page confusingly differed from the one before it!
A particularly clear-cut example of this is In Broken Images, co-commissioned by MITO SettembreMusica and the London Sinfonietta. Here his concept of well-defined groups of instruments, each with their own distinct material which gradually comes together for just a single bar, is visually represented on the page. Harry’s adamant instruction was that he wanted to see lots of ‘space’, not rests, around each block and the solos within those blocks to float alone to bring them out. Accordingly, we deleted the empty staves, keeping the groups at roughly the same vertical position throughout to highlight the antiphony. His postperformance rewriting, and lengthening, of the Brass opening (or healing the ‘wound’, as he called addressing an unsatisfactory passage) did not interfere with this concept. He hoped it would be ‘more interesting’ – and clearly it was, as this is the version he settled with.
Five Lessons in a Frame, written for the London Sinfonietta, again has a spacial element. The work set out to draw together five separate duets he had already composed for different
combinations of the Sinfonietta’s players, with a chorale for everybody. This was the pastingtogether job I was expecting. But, forever creative, he in fact recomposed nearly all of it: ‘I couldn’t not change things as I rewrote it out’ he apologetically told me, as I frantically started editing the new manuscript from scratch. The Message, the first duet, remains the least altered, some others are almost unrecognisable. Both the originals and the Five Lessons have specific instructions for the duetting soloists to be ‘as wide apart as possible’ or ‘close together’, illustrated in a layout diagram he wanted included in the score.
He was a pleasure to work with – a warm and generous friend, his mind inspiring and enriching. After shambling around our office, commenting disparagingly on an open manuscript ‘all in 4/4’ or, once, unrolling a newly purchased carpet (which seemed to offer him much more fascination than the manuscripts to be worked on), he liked to sit down together to tackle my pages and pages of queries, have the problems pointed out to him and discuss his muddles and mistakes, to ruminate and find answers.
He was meticulous in his intentions, characteristically including a plethora of articulation and dynamics, but not always quite so meticulous where his pencil landed. So in addition to the layout and presentation we would look at much detail: was that notehead on a line or space? Was the articulation meant to continue? (‘Yes, of course, I got bored.’) Familiar with harmonies he liked to use, or was at pains to avoid, I would enquire suspiciously of the particularly exposed offensive octave or pretty major 3rd, disguised by his A-D flat notation (‘Oh, mustn’t have any of those.’) I learnt that unlikely viola notes were often solved by reading in the bass or treble clef, and bars not adding up often resulted from vertical misalignments. Noteheads in a repetitive pattern might morph gradually from line to space and so change unintentionally. I learnt it was essential to check for misfired rhythmic unisons (doublings) and, in the case of In Broken Images, he asked me to check his hocketing, as ‘nothing sounds together’.
When stuck (or perhaps bored of my questioning) he might say ‘Make it up. You’ll do a better job than me’! Or sometimes the puzzle of a question produced a long silence while he pondered – eventually he might rewrite the bar or another that had caught his attention, or maybe his stream of thoughts had wandered elsewhere … and the ‘answer’ could be ‘I made a fake pizza the other day. D’you know that?’ (deep chuckle)
Over the years, despite the declining clarity of his hand, untangling the details in the spider’s webs of pencil notes became a little easier. I became familiar with his language, with these muddles and traps and his likely answers. Dear Harry is still with me, as if looking over my shoulder and commenting (and chuckling) as I work through the last remaining puzzles …
Sally Cox Senior Editor, Boosey & Hawkes‘HE WAS A PLEASURE TO WORK WITH – A WARM AND GENEROUS FRIEND, HIS MIND INSPIRING AND ENRICHING.’
Bill Colleran brought Harry to Universal Edition (UE) in 1957; he organised the production of his scores and devoted himself to promoting his music for over 40 years. Universal Edition’s belief in Harry’s music, at a time when contemporary music did not fill many concert goers with enthusiasm, was crucial.
One of my first encounters with Harry was on the occasion of a celebratory concert at Queen Elizabeth Hall given by the London Sinfonietta to mark Luciano Berio’s 50th birthday. UE hosted a dinner after the concert to which Berio guests and the players were invited. I was dispensing drinks and upon asking Harry whether he would prefer white or red wine he demanded ‘beer!’. I quickly discovered a man of few words who knew his own mind!
I remember attending a London Sinfonietta rehearsal of Carmen Arcadiae Mechanicae Perpetuum at the BBC Studios in Maida Vale. The players knew the piece so well that only a play through was required. When I looked down there were goose pimples on my bare arms, having just witnessed music of such astonishing presence.
One day Bill informed me that Harry was coming into Fareham Street to check his manuscript of The Mask of Orpheus which had reached Act 2, scene 1. This was becoming an opera of gargantuan proportions to which an electronic score was being added. Laying out an enormous pile of his autograph pages on the largest table we could find, he exclaimed ‘this piece gives me the polly-woggles’.
Whilst completing the enormous task of producing the orchestral parts, a new orchestral score entitled Earth Dances arrived from Harry which required urgent production for the BBC Symphony Orchestra. For some time I believe Harry’s music was engaging the services of practically every music copyist in town!
Harry’s work ethic was prodigious. His scores exhibited the most intricate notation always produced by hand and in pencil. He was very much a creature of routine starting work early in the morning and continuing throughout the day. The process of composition, however, and the challenges thrown up by each new piece never left his mind for a minute.
Harry was full of surprises. An office colleague once put a call through to me with the ominous introduction ‘it’s Harry ringing urgently from his house in France’. Fearing the worst, I answered breezily ‘hello, Harry’. A peaceful voice addressed me with the words ‘Is it a Goshawk I’m looking at high up in the sky?’ Sadly my ornithological expertise was unable to confirm this from the description he provided.
Harry was never given to verbosity. The words he did utter were telling and memorable. He often chose to convey the impetus behind his music by way of analogy. I found his way of looking at things refreshing, inspiring and entirely original.
I was truly in the presence of a remarkable force which enlarged my life and I suspect the lives of many others.
Ben Newing Director, Universal EditionHarrison Birtwistle and his music have always been a part of my musical life, and I feel so lucky that our paths crossed fairly regularly during the 12 years I worked for the London Sinfonietta (and subsequently at English National Opera and the London Symphony Orchestra).
Of the numerous Birtwistle rehearsals and performances I’ve attended, a handful in particular stand out in my memory: I was knocked out when I first heard The Mask of Orpheus at ENO in 1986, it was like nothing I’d ever encountered before with its ritual, its earthy repetition and its shimmering, ethereal electronics; and again in 1990 by the Sinfonietta’s premiere of the simple yet devastating theatricality of Ritual Fragment at the memorial concert for Michael Vyner. Punch and Judy, Gawain, The Second Mrs Kong – so many powerful experiences of Harry’s unique fusion of music and theatre come to mind. Among the wonderful Birtwistle works which first saw the light of day during my time at the Sinfonietta were the thrilling, mind-boggling Theseus Game, and the heartbreaking The Corridor; and it was always a pleasure to witness Harry’s (seemingly) calm, certain, easy and affectionate interactions with his family of London Sinfonietta musicians. A career highlight for me was working to bring a semi-staged production of The Last Supper to Milan and Turin for the Festival SettembreMusica in 2008 alongside many of Harry’s longstanding collaborators involved in the original Glyndebourne production, including conductor Elgar Howarth, director Martin Duncan and designer Alison Chitty.
A personal recollection of Harry which always makes me smile (and at the same time seems to me to unite his visual sensibilities, his love of cooking and eating, and his wry humour) is of an inconsequential conversation we had, some time in the last 10 years. ‘I like your glasses Harry’, I said. He seemed very pleased to be able to tell me ‘Do you know what this colour is called? Potato water’. I’d never heard that term to describe a colour before, and I don’t suppose I ever will again.
Thank you for the memories, Harry, and especially for the music.
Jane Williams Former Head of Artistic Planning at the London Sinfonietta
The London Sinfonietta always strives to extend its reach to more people with the inspiring sound of new music. This season we are showcasing modern masterpieces, and thought-provoking world premieres, plus a continued passion to inspire the public and young people with new music. The new work includes music from different genres – from contemporary classical to jazz and experimental – and collaborations with different art forms including video, animation, theatre and literature. We also release regular new content on our London Sinfonietta Digital Channel including a series of performance films, videos about new music and podcasts.
The London Sinfonietta was the first ensemble in the UK to launch a dedicated music education programme. This pioneering spirit has continued and flourished ever since, expanding to include regular performances and workshops with members of the public.
One such project is Sound Out, which facilitates groups of young people to enter the fascinating world of new music and learn more about how to compose, putting it into practice by interacting with London Sinfonietta musicians who seek to encourage and inspire the next generation of creative artists.
During the lockdowns of 2020 and 2021, we developed the programme to work online with a new set of video Composition Challenges. Schools from around the UK have taken part, extending our reach to 12,000 young people.
The London Sinfonietta supports emerging talent with its year-round programmes for composers, conductors and performers, giving early-career artists the opportunity to develop new skills and contacts as they establish themselves in the professional arena.
Our composer development scheme, Writing the Future, seeks to create new pieces of music that expand the chamber music format, and is open to music creators from all cultural and musical backgrounds who are passionate about their art form and would like the opportunity to apply that experience to writing for a contemporary music ensemble.
The London Sinfonietta Academy provides side-byside coaching and performance opportunities to young musicians, culminating in a concert showcase.
Academy Participant July 2019
Experience the best of the London Sinfonietta streamed directly to your device from the London Sinfonietta Channel. This season we’re continuing our regular releases of new performance films, and also delving deeper in our Introduction to Contemporary Instruments series. Look out for upcoming releases of music by Alex Paxton, Laura Jurd and Harrison Birtwistle. For podcast lovers, the second series of Couch to Concert with Paul Morley and Cerys Matthews explores Toru Takemitsu’s nature-inspired music.
Find out more at londonsinfonietta.org.uk/channel
“IT HELPED ME REALISE ANYONE CAN BE A COMPOSER –EVEN A PUPIL!”
Pupil response to Sound Out 2019
“IT’S A PRIVILEGE TO PLAY NEXT TO LONDON SINFONIETTA PLAYERS.”
“IF I WERE THE BRITISH GOVERNMENT, I’D DECLARE THE LONDON SINFONIETTA
A NATIONAL TREASURE ... LONG MAY IT CONTINUE TO MAKE NEW MUSIC.”
Steve ReichLondon Sinfonietta in rehearsal, 2014 © Hildegard Titus
We inspire audiences and involve the public in exciting sounds and performances. We spark imaginations and develop young people’s creativity. We train the next generation of performers and composers. We tell people’s stories. We make new music.
By making a donation to the London Sinfonietta, you can help create world-class new music projects both onstage and online for audiences to enjoy all around the world. You can help us reach thousands of young people each year through our composition programmes in schools, and you can enable us to provide world-class training to the next generation of performers, composers and conductors.
Fundraising accounts for approximately one third of our annual income. Without the generous support of individuals, sponsors and charitable trusts, we simply would not be able to achieve the scale of work that we are able to deliver with your help – inspiring a wide audience around the UK and internationally with the best music of today.
London Sinfonietta Pioneers provide a bedrock of support for all the work that we do – supporting all areas of the London Sinfonietta’s new music-making, and enabling us to reach an ever-wider audience with the music of today. And you’ll gain a closer insight into our work, with access to open rehearsals and exclusive behind-thescenes updates.
London Sinfonietta Pioneer membership starts from just £50. Visit our website to find out more and join us in pioneering new music today.
londonsinfonietta.org.uk/support-us
London Sinfonietta would like to thank the following organisations and individuals for their support:
TRUSTS AND FOUNDATIONS
Art Mentor Foundation Lucerne
The Boltini Trust
The D’Oyly Carte Charitable Trust
Daiwa Anglo-Japanese Foundation
Ernst von Siemens Music Foundation
Fidelio Charitable Trust
Garrick Charitable Trust
The Harold Hyam Wingate Foundation
Hinrichsen Foundation
Jerwood Arts
John Ellerman Foundation
The John S Cohen Foundation
Leverhulme Trust
Lucille Graham Trust
Marchus Trust
Peter Sowerby Foundation
PRS for Music Foundation
The Radcliffe Trust
Royal Philharmonic Society
The Vaughan Williams Foundation
Stanley Thomas Johnson Foundation
Steven R. Gerber Trust
Thriplow Charitable Trust
HONORARY PATRONS
David Atherton OBE
Alfred Brendel KBE
Gillian Moore MBE
Nicholas Snowman OBE
AMBASSADORS
Penny Jonas
Robert McFarland
Philip Meaden
Sir Stephen Oliver KC
Paul Zisman
ENTREPRENEURS
Anthony Mackintosh
Robert McFarland
Michael & Patricia McLaren-Turner
Sir Stephen Oliver KC
SINFONIETTA CIRCLE
Susan Costello
Dennis Davis
Susan Grollet
John Hodgson
Charlotte Morgan
Andy Spiceley
Paul & Sybella Zisman
ARTISTIC PIONEERS
Sharon Ament
Anton Cox
Philip Meaden
Stephen Morris
Simon Osborne
CREATIVE PIONEERS
Ian Baker
Keith Brown
Frances Bryant
Andrew Burke
Jeremy & Yvonne Clarke
Dennis Davis
John Goodier
Sir Andrew Hall
Simon Heilbron
Frank & Linda Jeffs
Kathryn & Alex Knight
Belinda Matthews
Andrew Nash
Julie Nicholls
Malcolm Reddihough
Iain Stewart
Plus those generous Artistic and Creative Pioneers who prefer to remain anonymous, as well as our loyal group of Pioneers.
PRINCIPAL PLAYERS
Gareth Hulse oboe (supported by
John Hodgson)
Mark van de Wiel clarinet
Simon Haram saxophone
Byron Fulcher trombone
Jonathan Morton violin (supported by
Paul & Sybella Zisman)
Paul Silverthorne viola
Tim Gill cello (supported by
Sir Stephen Oliver QC)
Enno Senft double bass (supported by
Anthony Mackintosh)
Helen Tunstall harp (supported by
Charlotte Morgan)
David Hockings percussion (supported by Andy Spiceley)
LONDON SINFONIETTA COUNCIL
Fiona Thompson chair
Sud Basu
Andrew Burke
Tim Gill (principal player)
Annabel Graham Paul
Kathryn Knight
Charlotte Morgan
Jonathan Morton (principal player)
Paul Silverthorne (principal player)
James Thomas
Ben Weston
LONDON SINFONIETTA STAFF
Andrew Burke
Chief Executive & Artistic Director
Frances Bryant
General Manager
Elizabeth Davies
Head of Finance
Ann Walker
Finance Officer
Natalie Marchant
Head of Concerts & Production
Alice Reeves
Professional Placement Trainee
Eleanor Killner
Development & Events Officer
Adam Flynn
Digital Productions Manager
Phoebe Walsh
Marketing Manager
Emily Heywood
Marketing Officer
Lily Caunt
Head of Participation & Learning
Rhuti Carr
Head of Participation & Learning (maternity leave)
FREELANCE & CONSULTANT STAFF
Hal Hutchison
Concert Manager
Lesley Wynne
Orchestra Personnel Manager
Tony Simpson
Lighting Designer
WildKat PR
The London SInfonietta is grateful to its auditors and accountants
MGR Weston Kay LLP
