Harrison Birtwistle: Refrains and Choruses

The Galliard Ensemble Richard Shaw - piano

Playing time: 73 mins.

£11.99 * / $18.50
Free Delivery Worldwide
All major currencies
* subject to exchange rates

CD of the Week, The Observer, 12th August 2001

One of the Manchester group from the Fifties, Birtwistle had an inclination toward the theatrical that pre-empted his spell as the National Theatre's director of music in the Seventies and Eighties. The contrast in activity between the sparse, Sati-esque Berceuse de Jeanne, for solo piano, and the manic chattering across two flutes and trumpet in Hoqutus Petrus is striking, yet there's a thoroughly original face to each of the pieces here - spanning 40 years - and a natural, even warm disposition to the instrumentation. The young Galliard Ensemble's performances are revelatory. Stunning music and extraordinary playing.
Edward Bhesania.

New Music Connoiseur

This release offers a welcome collection of Harrison Birtwistle’s shorter works for small wind groupings with and without keyboard accompaniment, as well as some brief solo piano pieces. A number of these selections, some quite obscure, are otherwise unavailable on CD. The music here spans a broad time frame of nearly fifty years duration; it’s very good, if highly eclectic stuff.

Much of the reason the latter description holds has to do with Birtwistle’s stunningly wide ranging influences. One encounters frankly tonal music mirroring Satie (much of the piano selections qualify here, such as the Gymnopedie-like Berceuse de Jeanne [1984], Sad Song [1971], and the early Oockooing Bird [ca. 1950]) and dissonant items displaying Varese-style grit (such as the brief solo piano entry Hector’s Dawn [1987] and the wind quintets Refrains and Choruses [1957] and Five Distances [1992]). This last also spatially spreads its ensemble members in the manner of Henry Brant and utilizes some elements of aleatory. Some of the duos for keyboard and wind instrument make even more wholehearted use of postwar indeterminate techniques: the clarinet/piano selection Linoi (1968) for example demonstrates a loose coordination between the two instruments and in the middle of the work asks the pianist to improvise a vigorous strummed accompaniment on the strings. An Uninterrupted Endless Melody (1991), for oboe and piano, is even more conceptual, having the oboe freely intone a deliberately cyclic line without clear beginning or end over a piano backing that can be chosen from three possible versions—and proceeds to repeat the process through a three movement context. Stravinsky’s practical neoclassic ethos gets updated in Duets for Storab (1983), scored for two flutes. And music from pre-Baroque eras also leaves its mark prominently. Hoquetus Petrus (1995), for two flutes and piccolo trumpet, shows that Birtwistle knows this stuttering Medieval technique intimately well (though one hears Varese rather than Machaut in the pitches chosen). And the otherwise Stravinskian Chorale from a Toy-Shop (1967) is scored, in best Renaissance manner, for whatever five instruments can play the particular parts that comprise the work. In a class by itself is the pointillistic duet Verses (1965) which overlays a clarinet line with debts to Olivier Messiaen upon a Milton Babbitt oriented piano texture.

What surprises this critic most is the fact that it all sounds like music written by the same composer. Like Ligeti, Birtwistle somehow is able to project a distinctive voice that does not rely on an inimitable harmonic language to impart uniqueness. And Birtwistle’s structures here, while never referential to anything from the Baroque through Romantic periods, contain a convincing inner logic of their own.

Performances are first-rate all the way. The British based Galliard Ensemble (a wind quintet consisting of Kathryn Thomas on flute, Owen Dennis on oboe, Katherine Spencer on clarinet, Helen Simons on bassoon, and Richard Bayliss on horn), joined by guests Mark Law (piccolo trumpet), Robert Manasse (flute), and Richard Shaw (piano), play this challenging music splendidly. Sound and editing are excellent. This disc is very highly recommended.
David Cleary.

Sunday Times, 5th August 2001

THIS DISC from an enterprising new label surveys Birtwistle's wind and solo piano music, from Refrains and Choruses for flute, oboe, clarinet, horn and bassoon (1957) - his opus one - to Five Distances (1992) for the same combination, and reveals how great and how little is the distance he has come. Refrains, with its savoured dissonances, north-country assertiveness, and chunky ritual structure, is already pure Birtwistle though a tyro piece. Five Distances calls on a far more cosmopolitan technique, but makes clear that this is not a composer given to stylistic revolutions. The attractive (flute) Duets for Storab, suave Verses for clarinet and piano, and ingenious An Interrupted Endless Melody for oboe and piano are among the 12 mostly rare items, all of them well performed.
Paul Driver.

Gramophone Magazine, November 2001

"A brisk, bracing, bravura Birtwistle recital from a young ensemble of considerable merit"

This satisfying compilation spans more than 40 years of Birtwistle, from a piano piece written in his mid-teens (Oockooing Bird) to Five Distances for wind quintet (1992), which foreshadows the capriciousness and dramatic urgency of the opera which followed close on its heels, The Second Mrs Kong.

Anyone who believes that Birtwistle's music has always been the same should play Linoi (1968) immediately after the rather impersonal Refrains and Choruses for wind quintet (1957). Written for clarinet and a very sparingly used piano, Linoi has all Birtwistle's archetypal lyric melancholy, and the attempts to escape from that melancholy, although futile, have great dramatic force. Not all the later works are on this level; for example, An Interrupted Endless Melody (1991) sustains a tone of plaintive lyricism and, despite sharply pointed piano punctuations of the oboe melody, it seems almost aimless as a result, especially when all three versions are played. But it is the most extended work, Five Distances, whose strongly characterised material and resourcefully evolving form reveal Birtwistle at his finest. This performance does it justice. Most of the miniatures on this new release are not currently available elsewhere, and the Galliard Ensemble versions, recorded with pinpoint clarit, can be warmly recommended. It's particularly good to find the smaller labels turning their attention to Birtwistle's earlier chamber pieces, which are all-too-rarely heard today.
Arnold Whittall.

BBC Music Magazine, October 2001

The primacy of wind instruments in Harrison Birtwistle's output can stand as much for their quality of primitive pastoral as for their much-prized neo-classical coolness. In the flute Duets for Storab it is the former quality that typically predominates. Beneath the surface of these variations there resides a shape as inevitable and archetypal as that of a prehistoric axe. It was this instinctive quality of music moving forward, without sense of antecedent and consequent, that market Refrains and Choruses (1957) for wind quintet as a milestone not only for Birtwistle's career, but also in the story of postwar British music. The other pieces on this disc either continue its implications, or add appendices, such as the youthful Oockooing Bird for piano which suggests Debussy's pentatonic preludes as a distant model. Hector's Dawn and Sad Song likewise show the composer's gift for whimsical thoughts of one idea. Verses, An Interrupted Endless Melody and Five Distances connect the main thread of Birtwistle's thinking with his music now, excellently played on this invaluable collection.
Nicholas Williams.

Classical London, September 2001

It is Birtwistle the miniaturist who is showcased here, a Birtwistle with a more human and accessible face than the composer of the operas and orchestral works which, rightly or wrongly, have kept his name in the limelight (not forgetting, of course, the notorious saxophone concerto "Panic" which created such a controversy at the Last Night of the Proms in 1995). There is still enough of that side of Birtwistle here to remind us what he is really like, but by and large, the works collected here reveal a quieter, gentler and even wittier side to this composer than one usually encounters. Fans will need no special pleading from me, but even the unconverted (and I speak as one myself) will find much here that is flavourful, interesting, and even enjoyable.

Nearly half-a-century of Birtwistle's career is covered here, from the strange little piano piece "Oockoing Bird" dating from the composer's teens (early 1950s or thereabouts), which sounds like Busoni at his most impenetrably occult, to the testily sparkling "Hoquetus Petrus" (1995), a 70th birthday present for Pierre Boulez. The Galliard Ensemble appears in its full quintet garb in only 3 of the works collected here, the "Refrains and Choruses", the composer's official opus 1 from 1957, the pungently jocular "Chorale from a Toy-shop" written as an 85th birthday present for travinsky (with some of the harmonies bringing the Russian's "Symphonies of Wind Instruments" to mind) and the more involved "Five Distances" from 1992.

The ensemble's clarinettist, Katherine Spencer, joins forces with pianist Richard Shaw (a solidly dependable presence throughout the disc) for 2 works: of these, I was not very taken with "Linoi" (1968). I far prefer the subtler, more reticent "Verses" (1965). Oboist Owen Dennis makes an equally persuasive advocate for the arrestingly lyrical "An Interrupted Endless Melody", and flautists Kathryn Thomas and Robert Manasse sound completely at home in the quirky, concise "Duets for Storab" (1983).

But, strangely, it is the little occasional piano pieces I find myself turning turning to for pure pleasure. They reveal a side of Birtwistle few will be familiar with. The pellucid "Berceuse de Jeanne" is a stand-out, and the equally beautiful "Sad Song" written in 1971 for young Adam.

Performances are beyond reproach (the composer must have been pleased with the results), and the recording is a model of unobtrusive clarity. Even if my overall view of Birtwistle remains essentially unchanged, this CD has undeniably softened it, and for that I can only be grateful.
Paul Pellay.