It will be 20 years next month since Harrison Birtwistle ambushed the unsuspecting audience for the Last Night of the Proms with the premiere of Panic, his dithyramb for saxophone, percussion and orchestra. The piece that the Daily Mail described afterwards as a “horrible cacophony” now seems to fit naturally into the scheme of Birtwistle’s music in the 80s and 90s. It may be a noisy and rebarbative sample of his music at that time, a bit of a tongue-in-cheek Dionysian romp, but the musical gestures and wind-based sound world are quintessential Birtwistle.
John Harle, the saxophonist for whom Panic was composed, recorded it soon afterwards, and this WDR recording, with Marcus Weiss on saxophone and Christian Dierstein on drums, matches that raw, in-your-face vividness and explosive energy.
Still, it is the recording of Antiphonies, the piano concerto that was completed in 1992, which provides the biggest revelation here. It’s always been, for me, one of the hardest of Birtwistle’s works to assimilate: even when you delve into its thickets and tease out the principles on which the half-hour single movement is constructed, something forbidding remains, and the music’s occasional pools of quiet lyricism prove all too brief. The score was revised in 2005 and that is the version Nicolas Hodges plays here, the revision making it more structurally convincing, and intensely, involvingly dramatic than I’ve ever heard it before, turning the climactic manic section – a Boulez-like toccata – into a virtuoso tour de force.
The two smaller-scale pieces on the disc are welcome firsts, too. Slow Frieze from 1996 is a chamber-scale pendant to Antiphonies – a series of episodes for piano and ensemble, in which the two protagonists seem to inhabit entirely separate musical worlds, moving in parallel and only rarely reinforcing each other in a slow, intensely beautiful processional.
Crowd, first performed in 2005 by Antonia Schreiber, who plays it in this recording, is Birtwistle’s only work for solo harp, an instrument that has played a major role in his soundscapes throughout his career. It’s a haunting, timeless piece, full of stark attacks and lingering resonances, which manages to sweep away all the harp’s usual associations with rippling, watery effects.
