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1.Birtwistle: Theseus Game; Earth Dances by: Ensemble Modern Pierre Boulez Martyn Brabbins Pierre André Valade August 09, 2004
Average Rating: >>More Details		List Price: £15.99 Off The Bookshelf's Price: £12.69 You Save: £3.30 (21%) Prices subject to change. Used Price: £8.00
Finally despairing of this disc ever being released across the pond, I coughed up the exchange rate so I could hear it before it went out of print entirely. And I don't regret it! This is one of the finest releases in the DG 20/21 series, and it is an ongoing mystery why it alone of the series has never been released Stateside. "Theseus Game" is a fantastic recent work (2002), a concerto for orchestra, with the thread of melody passed from one soloist to the next, winding through a complex, dynamic orchestral score. This is a live recording of the work's premiere performance in September 2003. The Ensemble Modern is broken into two groups, a la Elliott Carter, and conducted by both Martyn Brabbins and Pierre-Andre ... Read More:

2.Harrison Birtwistle: The Axe Manual - complete piano works from: Metronome August 05, 2004
Average Rating: >>More Details		List Price: £16.99 Off The Bookshelf's Price: £14.69 You Save: £2.30 (14%) Prices subject to change. Used Price: £9.50
A curious mixture, this disc. This is a collection of what, in the Nineteenth Century, would probably have been called Album Pieces, dating from Birtwistle's teenage years (Ookooing Bird) almost up to the present. These are slight pieces, all interesting, all reflecting the composer's uncompromising style, but not enough to delay the listener much longer than the time it takes to play them. And then there are two major works - Harrison's Clocks and The Axe Manual. Both these pieces' titles are typical Birtwistle puns. The first refers to the famous horologist who created timepieces that allowed mariners to accurately fix their longitude as much as to its composer's christian name. It is a series of explorations of the kind of musical ... Read More:

3.Birtwistle: Punch and Judy from: Etcetera November 01, 1989
Average Rating: >>More Details		Used Price: £18.75
A curious mixture, this disc. This is a collection of what, in the Nineteenth Century, would probably have been called Album Pieces, dating from Birtwistle's teenage years (Ookooing Bird) almost up to the present. These are slight pieces, all interesting, all reflecting the composer's uncompromising style, but not enough to delay the listener much longer than the time it takes to play them. And then there are two major works - Harrison's Clocks and The Axe Manual. Both these pieces' titles are typical Birtwistle puns. The first refers to the famous horologist who created timepieces that allowed mariners to accurately fix their longitude as much as to its composer's christian name. It is a series of explorations of the kind of musical ... Read More:

4.Birtwistle: The Mask of Orpheus from: NMC November 17, 1997
Average Rating: >>More Details		List Price: £26.99 Off The Bookshelf's Price: £23.49 You Save: £3.50 (13%) Prices subject to change. Used Price: £21.00
It's taken me a few listens to get going with this but understanding has given way to awe as the scope of Birtwistle's intent has dawned on me. This is a total work of art beyond mere pigeon-holing as music. It is ritual theatre that draws on roots as far back as classical Greek drama, integrating startling orchestration and state of the art electronic synthesis, to give rise to something that is utterly new and vital, and that manages to entirely avoid the post-modernisist traps that most contemporary music falls into. The thing operates on so many levels, both compositionally and dramatically that one could hear it many, many times and still only have scratched the surface. If you believe in the future of the tradition of high European art then ... Read More:

5.Harrison Birtwistle from: Decca May 14, 2001
Average Rating: >>More Details		Used Price: £28.49
I came to Harrison Birtwhistle's music as someone drawn in by BBC Radio 3's increasingly diverse musical policy, in particular through a season which included many of the pieces included here. My own musical background is in industrial/avante garde rock, so the strangeness and superficial 'difficulty' in the sound is, if anything, an attraction, but the underlying complexity and - even - lushness of this music is a revalation. I've encountered music that attempts moods of mystery, reflective melancholy and ritual invocation before, but nothing where technical accomplishment and execution live up to the artist's conception to such overpowering effect. . . and here are one hundred and fifty minutes of performances, for the price of ... Read More:

6.Harrison Birtwistle: The Triumph Of Time/Gawain's Journey from: Collins August 24, 1993
Average Rating: >>More Details		Used Price: £6.00
I came to Harrison Birtwhistle's music as someone drawn in by BBC Radio 3's increasingly diverse musical policy, in particular through a season which included many of the pieces included here. My own musical background is in industrial/avante garde rock, so the strangeness and superficial 'difficulty' in the sound is, if anything, an attraction, but the underlying complexity and - even - lushness of this music is a revalation. I've encountered music that attempts moods of mystery, reflective melancholy and ritual invocation before, but nothing where technical accomplishment and execution live up to the artist's conception to such overpowering effect. . . and here are one hundred and fifty minutes of performances, for the price of ... Read More:

7.Birtwistle: Secret Theatre; Silbury Air from: Etcetera April 14, 1994
Average Rating: >>More Details		Used Price: £62.33
This is the most fabulous introduction to Birtwistle. Its relative simplicity, brevity and insistent rhythmic energy make Carmen Arcadiae one of his most immediately fun pieces, and it is probably the best place to start for a new listener. Although all three works are for similar ensemble and from the same period of his career, they reveal the variety of his musical character. They are good examples respectively of the ritual/mechanistic/brutal/comical Birtwistle, the subtle tone painter, and the builder of deeply complicated architectures. All display Birtwistle at his finest and are played superby here.

8.Birtwistle: Antiphonies from: Collins Classics October 17, 1994
Average Rating: >>More Details		Used Price: £10.00
This is the most fabulous introduction to Birtwistle. Its relative simplicity, brevity and insistent rhythmic energy make Carmen Arcadiae one of his most immediately fun pieces, and it is probably the best place to start for a new listener. Although all three works are for similar ensemble and from the same period of his career, they reveal the variety of his musical character. They are good examples respectively of the ritual/mechanistic/brutal/comical Birtwistle, the subtle tone painter, and the builder of deeply complicated architectures. All display Birtwistle at his finest and are played superby here.

9.Birtwistle: Choral and Orchestral Works from: NMC March 14, 2005
Average Rating: >>More Details		List Price: £13.99 Off The Bookshelf's Price: £11.69 You Save: £2.30 (16%) Prices subject to change. Used Price: £7.49
All three works on this disc are essential Birtwistle. Oliver Knussen is one of best conductors in the world. The London Sinfonietta needs no introduction. And NMC is one of the great independent labels. What else do you need? Well, I know Birtwistle's music alienates some people, and in its way it is more radical than anything 50/60s Darmstadt serialism could offer. But it is perhaps also the most interesting, often in a extra-musical way. Birtwistle, perhaps like Michel Foucault, seems to engage with forgotten areas of history (both musical and cultural, especially that of Britain). He makes history seem a strange, different, and incomprehensible world; he stresses its difference, and thus makes us re-exmaine our current position ... Read More:

10.Birtwistle - Gawain by: Covent Garden Royal Opera House Orchestra April 01, 1996
Average Rating: >>More Details		Used Price: £59.75
This is music in the very powerful style that Birtwistle has developed in the last four decades or so. My problem with Gawain: Birtwistle seems to have imagined the entire Gawain story in one mode, which I might call one of ominous dread. The banquet scene doesn't feel festive, the seduction doesn't feel sexy, it's all just pounding, driving fury and foreboding. This is not a problem I have with The Mask of Orpheus, which is much more fully imagined. Nor is it a problem in, say, Earth Dances, which has similar music to that of Gawain, but one doesn't feel that a complex story has been fused into a single impulse.

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