Sir Harrison Birtwistle.
Born Accrington, 15 July 1934.
Sir Harrison Birtwistle studied clarinet and composition at the Royal Manchester College of Music, making contact with a highly talented group of contemporaries including Peter Maxwell Davies, Alexander Goehr, John Ogdon and Elgar Howarth.
In 1965 he sold his clarinets to devote all his efforts to composition, and travelled to Princeton as a Harkness Fellow where he completed the opera Punch and Judy. This work, together with Verses for Ensembles and The Triumph of Time, firmly established him as a leading voice in British music.
The decade from 1973 to 1984 was dominated by his monumental lyric tragedy The Mask ofOrpheus, staged by English National Opera in 1986, and by the series of ensemble scores: Secret Theatre, Silbury Air and Carmen Arcodiae Mechanicoe Perpetuum. Large-scale works in the following decade included the operas Gawain and The Second Mrs Kong, the concertos Endless Parade for trumpet and Antiphonies for piano, and the orchestral score Earth Dances.
His orchestral works since 1995 include Exody, premiered by the Chicago Symphony OrchestralDaniel Barenboim, Panic which received its premiere at the Last Night of the 1995 BBC Proms with an estimated worldwide audience of 100 million, and The Shadow of Night commissioned by the Cleveland Orchestra (Christoph von Dohnanyi The Lost Supper received its first performances at the Deutsche Staatsoper in Berlin and at Glyndebourne
in 2000. Pulse Shadows, a meditation for soprano, string quartet and chamber ensemble on poetry Paul Celan, was released on CD and won the 2002 Gramophone Award for best contemporary recording. Theseus Game, co-commissioned by RUHRtriennale, Ensemble Modern and the London Sinfonietta, was premiered in 2003. The following year brought first performances of The 10 Passionfor Aldeburgh Almeida Opera and Night's Block Bird
commissioned by Roche for the Lucerne Festival. His opera The Minotaur received its premiere at the Royal Opera House Covent Garden in 2008 and has been released on DVD.
Works premiered in the past decade include his music theatre work The Corridor which opened the Aldeburgh Festival and toured to the Southbank Centre and the Bregenz Festival, with further performances in New York and Amsterdam. Birtwistle's Violin Concerto for Christian Tetzlaff was premiered by the Boston Symphony Orchestra in 20 11, followed by performances at the BBC Proms, Tokyo Composium and Salzburg Festival. Harrison Birtwistle's 80th birthday year in 2014 saw the premiere of Responses for piano and orchestra, touring internationally with Pierre- Laurent Aimard as soloist, and 2015 brought a new music theatre work The Cure performed in a double-bill with The Corridor at the Aldeburgh Festival and the Royal Opera House in London. Harrison Birtwistle has received many honours, including the Grawemeyer Award in 1968 and the Siemens Prize in 1995; he was made a Chevalier de l'Ordre des Arts et des Lettres in 1986, awarded a Knighthood in 1988 and made a Companion of Honour in 2001. He was Henry Purcell Professor of Music at King's College, University of London (1995-2001) and is currently a Visiting Professor at the Royal Academy of Music in London.
2017 © biographical note kindly supplied by the composer's publisher, Boosey & Hawkes
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