Harrison Birtwistle, one of the UK’s foremost composers, has died aged 87. Birtwistle’s compositions of uncompromising modernism – ranging from large-scale grand opera to intimate solo piano pieces – have dominated British music for more than five decades. He was born in Accrington in 1934, and as a young clarinettist played in theatre bands and began composing. He studied in Manchester at the Royal Northern College of Music, where, along with his fellow students Alexander Goehr and Peter Maxwell Davies, he was part of an explosion of musical creativity, and belonged to a group once labelled “the Manchester School”.
His first chamber opera, Punch and Judy, premiered at the Aldeburgh festival in 1968, and legend has it that the violence of its story and music outraged much of its audience, including festival founder Benjamin Britten who apparently left at the interval. (Birtwistle himself directed a revival of the opera at the festival in June 1991.) The Triumph of Time, in 1972, inspired by a woodcut of the same name by Pieter Bruegel the Elder, secured his international reputation and remains one of his best-known works.
