Harrison Birtwistle

Featuring: Peter Zinovieff

condition (record/cover): NM / EX

Gatefold sleeve.

The definitive document of Harrison Birtwistle as an orchestral composer at the height of his powers - and, on the original Argo pressing, a record of considerable rarity. The Triumph of Time (1972), conducted by Peter Maxwell Davies with the BBC Symphony Orchestra, takes Pieter Bruegel the Elder's painting of the same name as its departure point: the slow, inexorable procession of a funerary cortège from which all sense of destination or resolution has been removed, leaving only the terrible force of movement itself. Twenty-five minutes of music that moves with the implacable weight of a geological process, Birtwistle building his characteristic blocks of sound - melody, fanfare, chorale, ostinato - and allowing them to collide and accumulate without the relief of conventional development or closure.

Paired with it on this Argo LP, Chronometer (1972) - a tape work realized in collaboration with Peter Zinovieff, constructed from the recorded sounds of clocks and time-measuring devices and subjected to electronic transformation - pursues the same obsession through entirely different means. Time here is not the subject of a philosophical meditation but its raw material: the mechanical production of temporal measurement itself, stripped of its function and returned to pure sonic phenomenon. Argo, ZRG 790.