Harrison Birtwistle (no h) studied at the Royal Northern, and his contemporaries included Peter Maxwell Davies, Alexander Goehr, John Ogdon, and Elgar Howarth.
His music has been known to be challenging – today’s choice was composed whilst he was on a scholarship to Yale, and premiered at the Aldeburgh Festival, with Benjamin Britten leaving at the interval (to be fair, I did the same to Britten’s Gloriana at Covent Garden in 2013).
His early writing style can be compared to Messiaen, Varèse, and he was strongly influenced by Boulez and Stockhausen.
The orchestration for today’s choice – a chamber opera on the gruesome stories of Punch and Judy – includes an on-stage orchestra including flute/piccolo, oboe/cor anglais, clarinet/bass clarinet/saxophone, horn, bassoon/contrabassoon, complemented by strings, trumpet, trombone, harp and percussion, with the string players required to play some percussion. As you do.
The Listening Project Blog 