Harrison Birtwistle: Chamber Music

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All one can do with music as esoteric as this is to remember the greatness of what Birtwistle has written before and go on listening...The singer of what sounds like an extraordinary difficult... — BBC Music Magazine, July 2014, 5 out of 5 stars More…

Release Date: 14th Apr 2014
Catalogue No: 4765050
Label: ECM
Series: New Series
Length: 65 minutes

Gramophone Awards

2015

Finalist - Contemporary

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Birtwistle: Three Settings Of Lorine Niedecker

Work length4:18

$3.30

$4.50

$6.15

Adrian Brendel (cello), Amy Freston (soprano)
Recorded: 2011-08-24
Recording Venue: Herkulessaal, Munich

Always North Of Him

Track length1:19

$1.10

$1.50

$2.05

I Was The Solitary Plover

Track length1:42

$1.10

$1.50

$2.05

As I Shook Dust From My Father's Door

Track length1:17

$1.10

$1.50

$2.05

Birtwistle: Trio for violin, violoncello and piano

Work length15:53

$1.10

$1.50

$2.05

Lisa Batiashvili (violin), Adrian Brendel (cello), Till Fellner (piano)
Recorded: 2011-08-24
Recording Venue: Herkulessaal, Munich

Birtwistle: Bogenstrich (Song Cycle for baritone, cello, and piano)

Work length31:26

$5.50

$7.50

$10.25

Till Fellner (piano), Roderick Williams (baritone), Adrian Brendel (cello)
Recorded: 2011-08-24
Recording Venue: Herkulessaal, Munich

Liebes-Lied 1

Track length6:03

$1.10

$1.50

$2.05

Lied ohne Worte

Track length6:16

$1.10

$1.50

$2.05

Variationen

Track length6:22

$1.10

$1.50

$2.05

Wie eine Fuge

Track length6:19

$1.10

$1.50

$2.05

Liebes-Lied 2

Track length6:26

$1.10

$1.50

$2.05

Birtwistle: Nine Settings for Lorine Niedecker for Soprano and cello

Work length13:26

$9.90

$13.50

$18.45

Adrian Brendel (cello), Amy Freston (soprano)
Recorded: 2011-08-24
Recording Venue: Herkulessaal, Munich

There's A Better Shine

Track length1:01

$1.10

$1.50

$2.05

My Friend Tree

Track length0:48

$1.10

$1.50

$2.05

Along The River

Track length1:34

$1.10

$1.50

$2.05

Hear Where Her Snowgrave Is

Track length1:01

$1.10

$1.50

$2.05

How The White Gulls

Track length2:02

$1.10

$1.50

$2.05

My Life

Track length2:13

$1.10

$1.50

$2.05

Paul

Track length1:43

$1.10

$1.50

$2.05

O Late Fall

Track length1:09

$1.10

$1.50

$2.05

Sleep's Dream

Track length1:55

$1.10

$1.50

$2.05

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This album of Sir Harrison Birtwistle’s chamber music and songs, mostly of recent vintage, is issued as the innovative Great British composer approaches his 80th birthday (he was born in Accrington in July 1934). It features an exceptional line-up of performers. Heard together and separately is the trio of Austrian pianist Till Fellner, Georgian violinist Lisa Batiashvili and English cellist Adrian Brendel. They are joined by London-born singers, soprano Amy Freston and baritone Roderick Williams.

The compositions include “Bogenstrich” written in 2006 as a short piece in tribute to Alfred Brendel and first played by his son Adrian together with Till Fellner. It was subsequently expanded into a cycle with the addition of settings of Rilke for baritone, cello and piano.

The Trio for piano, violin and cello is the newest piece, premiered in 2011, a 16-minute single movement work of elaborate patterning, gestures and responses.

Settings of the concise writings of US Objectivist poet Lorine Niedecker (1903-1970), scored for soprano and cello in 1998 and 2000, begin and close the album. As Bayan Northcott writes in the booklet, “These concentrated songs demand the utmost of their performers in precision, expression and timing. As in Webern’s settings, the few words and notes on the page can seem to imply whole worlds of thought and feeling”. This highly concentrated chamber-scale expressivity is felt throughout the entire album, recorded at Munich’s famed Herkulessaal, and produced by Manfred Eicher.

Reviews

July 2014

All one can do with music as esoteric as this is to remember the greatness of what Birtwistle has written before and go on listening...The singer of what sounds like an extraordinary difficult vocal line is Roderick Williams, always a great artist and here setting a standard it is hard to imagine being equalled.

August 2014

There are a dozen of [Niedecker's poems] here to which Birtwistle responds with great refinement of sound and procedure...Roderick Williams is very fine in Bogenstrich and the three instrumentalists, quite closely recorded, are in a class any composer would die for.

22nd June 2014

by stealth, insinuation and even a kind of double bluff (snatches of outright parody), Birtwistle makes [chamber music] his own.

1st May 2014

Terse to the point of aphorism, the [Niedecker settings] are perhaps the most Webern-like of all Birtwistle's works, capable of opening up huge, expressive vistas from just a handful of notes; Amy Freston and Adrian Brendel catch that spareness perfectly.

26th April 2014

this gripping disc of fairly recent chamber and vocal music is unexpectedly playful, tender, mysterious, mellow, sparse and elegiac. The performers are top-notch...and the interpretations intense and cogent.

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