Sir Harrison Birtwistle has died aged 87

Taking inspiration from sources including Greek myth, British folk tales and the English landscape, Birtwistle created major works including The Mask of Orpheus, The Minotaur and Gawain. His uncompromising approach is characterised by a distinctive combination of emotion and aggression.

Born in the Lancashire town of Accrington in 1934, Birtwistle studied both clarinet and composition at the Royal Manchester College of Music (now the Royal Northern College of Music). Although he had received a clarinet scholarship, he decided to focus solely on composition in 1960.

After a 3-year period as director of music at Wiltshire’s Cranborne Chase School from 1962-65, he took a Harkness Fellowship at Princeton University in the US, where he would go on to complete Punch and Judy. Alongside Verses for Ensembles and The Triumph of Time, this opera was instrumental in the establishment of Birtwistle in British Classical music.

Roger Wright, CEO of Britten Pears Arts, the charity behind Aldeburgh Festival where four Birtwistle operas including Punch and Judy were premiered, tweeted: ‘Desperately sad news about Harry Birtwistle. A privilege to have known him and worked with him… Colossal figure and an inspiration. Will be sorely missed.’

Birtwistle returned to London to take the role of musical director of the Royal National Theatre from 1975 to 1983. Following this, a 1986 Channel 4 television documentary about Birtwistle, combined with the 1995 Last Night of the Proms premiere of his work Panic for saxophone propelled him into the public consciousness.

Birtwistle received the Chévalier des Arts et des Lettres in 1986 and the University of Louisville Grawemeyer Award for Music Composition the following year. As well as receiving a knighthood in 1988, he was made a member of the Order of the Companions of Honour in 2000. His other accolades include the 1995 Ernst von Siemens Music Prize, and the 2015 Wihuri Sibelius prize for music.

His music has attracted international conductors including Daniel Barenboim, Edward Gardner, Daniel Harding, Sir Antonio Pappano, Sir Simon Rattle, and Ryan Wigglesworth and in 2014 his 80th birthday was celebrated with premiers at London’s Southbank Centre. The London Philharmonic conducted by Vladimir Jurowski and pianist Pierre-Laurent Aimard performed works including piano concerto Responses: Sweet Disorder and Carefully Careless.

You can find out more about Harrison Birtwistle here.