Loomis continued, adding that “this is not music from which one derives much sheer pleasure, but it is intently theatrical.” “One did not expect this crusty composer to turn mellow at 73, and he has not done so,” Mr. “Birtwistle’s score is relentlessly modernistic, its astringency serving to underscore the opera’s violence and unremitting tension,” the critic George Loomis wrote in The International Herald Tribune. Greek sources wove a more constant thread, from instrumental works that borrowed ancient structures like the early “Tragoedia” (1965), to his most successful operas: “The Mask of Orpheus,” a massively complex expansion of the tale that won the prestigious Grawemeyer Prize in 1987, and “The Minotaur,” an unsparingly graphic work with baying crowds and a rape scene it had its premiere at Covent Garden in 2008. In “Gawain,” which was given its premiere at the Royal Opera House in 1991, the legend was Arthurian. “This is music made to speak now, authoritatively,” he added, “and (like little else in our time) made to last.”
Reviewing “The Shadow of Night,” the critic Paul Griffiths wrote in The New York Times in 2002 that that orchestral work was “like all its predecessors: something strikingly new but heavy with echoes from the past and, indeed, the future.” Birtwistle did, however, he did in a unique style of indelible permanence. Birtwistle, who was active mainly in Europe, said in 1999. “I can only do one thing, and there is nothing else,” Mr. Dissonant, weighty and to some ears forbidding, they often dwelled on similar themes from piece to piece, interrogating kindred ideas from different angles, developing ideas touched on earlier. Birtwistle’s granitic, earthy works revealed their secrets slowly, and their structures were labyrinthine.
His death was announced by a spokesman for his music publisher, Boosey & Hawkes. Harrison Birtwistle, whose intensely theatrical compositions and uncompromising modernism made him the most prominent British composer since Benjamin Britten, died on Monday at his home in Mere, England.
0 kommentar(er)
