Melinda Maxwell (oboe), Helen Tunstall (harp), Andrew Watts (counter-tenor) with Claire Seaton (soprano), William Stafford and Tom Verity (clarinets/bass clarinets) & Ben Fullbrook (marimba)
CD
$17.50
Usually despatched in 4 - 5 working days.
Sir Harrison Birtwistle’s compositional life from the mid 1970s to the 1980s was dominated by his opera The Mask of Orpheus, and the same period saw the origin of the Elegies, written for Melinda Maxwell and Helen Tunstall while they were working with the composer at the National Theatre.
‘They are like enchanted preludes…Enchantingly performed here’ The Sunday Times
November 2009
*****
“The range of musical processes and the power with which Birtwistle invest the writing is extraordinary. The pieces seem like snapshots from different perspectives of some vast, barely graspable musical object, one whose contours are constantly in flux and never definable. This performance is a fabulously committed, expressively pliable performance...”
November 2009
“Orpheus Elegies…engages with Rilke's Sonnets to Orpheus, but keeps them at a distance. All three performers, in recordings that balance exemplary clarity of focus with finely sculpted detail, are wholly "inside" the piece's flexible yet inexorable formal design, which the composer describes in the admirably detailed booklet-notes as "like postcards with cryptic text".”
