Sir Harrison Birtwistle was born in 1934 and studied clarinet and composition at the Royal Academy of Music. In 1960, he 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 Birtwistle as a leading voice in British music.
The decade from 1977 to 1986 was dominated by his lyric tragedy, The Mask of Orpheus, and by the series of ensemble scores: Secret Theatre, Silbury Air, Carmen Arcadiae Mechanicae Perpetuum and …agm….
Important large-scale compositions include his operas The Minotaur, Gawain, The Second Mrs Kong and The Last Supper; concertos Panic, Antiphonies and Concerto for Violin and Orchestra; as well as orchestral scores Earth Dances, Exody and The Shadow of Night. Other major works include Theseus Game, Neruda Madrigales, Angel Fighter and In Broken Images.
In 2014, Harrison Birtwistle composed Responses: Sweet Disorder and the Carefully Careless, a concerto for piano and orchestra for his 80th birthday year, which was co-commissioned by Musica Viva Munich, Casa da Música Porto, London Philharmonic Orchestra and Boston Symphony Orchestra.
Other notable highlights include The Cure for the Aldeburgh Festival and Royal Opera House; 5 Lessons in a Frame for London Sinfonietta and Ensemble Musikfabrik; and Deep Time, which was commissioned by the Staatskapelle Berlin and the BBC, and received its UK premiere at the 2017 Proms.
Recent works include Intrada for piano and percussion, a duo for Colin Currie and Nicolas Hodges; Keyboard Engine: A Construction for Two Pianos, commissioned for Pierre-Laurent Aimard and Tamara Stefanovich; and Duet for Eight Strings for The Nash Ensemble.
Birtwistle has received many honours including the Grawemeyer Award for Music Composition, Ernst von Siemens Music Prize, Wihuri Sibelius Prize, Chevalier des Arts et des Lettres and a British knighthood. He was made Companion of Honour in 2001.
Photo by Philip Gatward