Birtwistle: Antiphonies for Piano and Orchestra / Nomos / An Imaginary Landscape - Classical Music CD for Piano Lovers & Orchestra Enthusiasts | Perfect for Study, Relaxation & Concert Preparation

If you are looking for easy-listening contemporary music, pass this one. Birtwistle's music is not easy listening. No beautiful, searingly lyrical melody here. In Antiphonies, a Concerto for piano composed in 1993, there is unrelenting pounding and violence with little repose, a load of musical events whose architecture and logic is often elusive, many many notes under the pianist's fingers (and Johanna MacGregor sounds impressively on top of them), and a sense of unleashed power verging on cacophony. It outdoes Ives by a number of steps, it is in a category with Xenakis' Synaphai (Synaphai / Aroura / Antikhton). Seductive certainly not, but impressive certainly.Same comment applies to the two earlier works, Nomos (1968) and An Imaginary Landscape (1971). The liner notes contend that both Birtwistle's operas "The Mask of Orpheus" (1984) and Gawain (1990) were two watersheds in his stylistic development, and that there are the pre- and post-Orpheus works, Antiphonies being further Birtwistle's first post-Gawain orchestral composition. I don't really hear such a striking difference. Again in both pieces there is orchestral brutality and pent-up menace, outbursts and brooding processions, jagged and apparently arbitrary musical events, piercing brass and winds, agitated percussion. Nomos has something of the eerie, atmospheric quality of Ligeti's Atmospheres but with more angularity and dramatic shifts. Again, don't take these descriptions as implied criticism. The music is certainly not easy to take, certainly not seductive, but certainly impressive. All of Birtwistle's compositions are, according to his own expression (re the liner notes), "imaginary landscapes", in which "one starts, stops, moves around, looks at the overall view, fixes one's attention on a particular feature or on a detail of that feature or on a fragment of that detail or on the texture of that fragment". Not Accapulco, this imaginary landscape - rather the Himalayas in stormy weather, so take your survival kit.TT 68:10. Collins is now long gone and this CD (and others from this label) is offered at high prices on the marketplace. Sometimes it'll surface on the famous competing auction site and I was lucky to get mine for cheap. But Naxos has been reissuing some of Collins' wonderful Britten releases, and NMC has reissued some other Collins Birtwistle instalments, so hopefully one of them will pick up this one too some day (P.S. from May 2015: about this see the exchange with Octave in the comments).