Birtwistle at 80, Barbican

This July, the much-acclaimed English composer Sir Harrison Birtwistle will be celebrating his 80th birthday, and programmers the Barbican are getting the party started two months early with a fortnight of concerts and other events dedicated to the composer’s distinguished career. 

It is impossible to sum up an output as expansive and varied as Birtwistle’s in brief terms, but over the course of the 50 or so years that he has been in the public eye, the words “visceral”, “dramatic” and “ritualistic” have often been used to describe his music. For those with a keen ear, the structural procedures of Birtwistle’s work are particularly notable: his pieces frequently return to variations on a small amount of core material, as if the listener is viewing a single building from a number of different angles and distances.

This impressively curated series takes us through a significant portion of Birtwistle’s ouevre, from breakthrough works such as Tragoedia for chamber ensemble through to the expansive mature opera, Gawain, which will be performed in its entirety by the brilliant Martyn Brabbins and the BBC Symphony Orchestra on 16 May. Based on the Middle English romance, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, Gawain is emblematic of Birtwistle’s approach to dramatic narrative, combining multiple versions of the story. On 20 May, we look forward to seeing Daniel Harding conduct the London Symphony Orchestra through the orchestral behemoth Earth Dances, which imposes itself on the concert hall like a tempo-spitting cyclone. 

The quality of the orchestras and ensembles cannot be questioned, and as far as the conductors are concerned, you are spoilt for choice. We cannot wait to see Oliver Knussen taking on a multiplicity of significant chamber works with Birmingham Contemporary Music Group on 25 May, or Baldur Brönnimann leading the Britten Sinfonia through a semi-staged version of the chamber opera Yan Tan Tethera on 29 May. There is so much of Birtwistle’s wonderful music to explore over this extra-special fortnight, and so many performances of the highest quality, that it would be criminal to miss out.