Harrison Birtwistle

condition (record/cover): NM / VG+ (light ring wear)

Insert included.

Three major works from Harrison Birtwistle's most concentrated creative decade - the 1960s and early 1970s - gathered on this Decca HEAD pressing under the direction of David Atherton with the London Sinfonietta, the ensemble whose founding in 1968 did more than any other institutional development to secure a performance infrastructure for British new music. Verses for Ensembles (1969) is among Birtwistle's most characteristic pieces: a work that organizes its forces into spatially separated groups and subjects them to a process of accumulation and fragmentation that operates simultaneously as formal structure and as theater - the players physically moving through the performance space as the music requires.

Nenia: The Death of Orpheus (1970), for soprano and instruments, draws on the myth that would preoccupy Birtwistle across his career - Orpheus as the figure for music itself, and for the catastrophic consequences of the desire to look back. The Fields of Sorrow (1971), for two sopranos, chorus, and instruments, extends this mythological territory with the particular bleakness that the early 1970s brought to Birtwistle's imagination. Three works, each complete in itself, which together constitute an essential document of the most uncompromising compositional vision in post-war British music. Decca, HEAD 7.