哈里森·比特维斯托
作曲
Sir Harrison Birtwistle developed an independent, dramatic and clearly defined musical language at an early stage, which, independent of any musical school, draws on a strong visual imagination in its physical presence. His work ranges from chamber and choral music to arrangements and settings of poems to large-scale orchestral works and operas, which have time and again caused a sensation. “He is probably our most original and individual composer,” says his British compatriot Sir Simon Rattle.
Harrison Birtwistle, born in Accrington in Lancashire in 1934, studied clarinet and composition at the Royal Manchester College of Music, where he met Peter Maxwell Davies and Elgar Howarth, among others. In addition to his studies and regular appearances in concerts with the New Music Manchester Group, Birtwistle intensively studied medieval compositional techniques in order to apply them to his own work. His early works reveal a distinctly linear way of thinking: “walking a line”, as Birtwistle’s creative role model Paul Klee once put it. His first official work, the wind quintet Refrains and Choruses, was premiered at the Cheltenham Festival in 1959. Birtwistle, who played clarinet in the Royal Liverpool Philharmonic Orchestra for a short time, went to Princeton (USA) as a Harkness Fellow, where he completed his opera Punch and Judy – a work that established his reputation as one of Britain’s leading composers. In 1967, he founded the contemporary music ensemble Pierrot Players with Peter Maxwell Davies and Stephen Pruslin. In 1970, together with clarinettist Alan Hacker, he founded the experimental group Matrix. Following the success of Earth Dances, which Pierre Boulez conducted in Munich as part of the musica viva series and at the Wien Modern festival, among other venues, numerous composition commissions from international institutions followed. He taught at King’s College and was Director of Composition at the Royal College of Music in London. A recipient of many awards, Harrison Birtwistle died in Mere, Wiltshire on 18 April 2022.
