David Atherton

Birtwistle - The Fields of Sorrow

Alun Hoddinott was born in Bargoed, Glamorganshire, South Wales. He showed musical aptitude young, beginning violin lessons at the age of four, later becoming a founder-member (playing the viola) of the National Youth Orchestra of Wales. He won a composition scholarship to the University College of South Wales at sixteen. Hoddinott began composing as a boy, but withdrew most of his early works, including some that had already been performed and broadcast. His sequence of symphonies has been seen as the centre of his achievement, but his concertos are hardly less important. By the time of his Third Symphony, completed when he was forty, he had written thirteen concertante works, for a wide range of solo instruments and scorings. The early concertos for oboe and for clarinet are with strings only, the First Piano Concerto uses wind and percussion without strings, the Organ Concerto a large orchestra particularly rich in percussion ...

Birtwistle: Punch and Judy

A tragical comedy or a comical tragedy

Punch and Judy elaborates the traditional puppet-play into an opera of stylised violence and ritual. While the simplicity of the children’s entertainment is retained in the opera by the characters—familiar and puppet-like—by the invented ‘nursery-rhymes’ of the libretto, and by the waltzes, lullabies and serenades of the music, the tragi-comic actions of a homicidal puppet are raised almost to the status of myth as Punch murders Judy over and over again.

Panufnik - Symphonies

Première recordings of these two symphonies which remain the only recordings and which have been much sought-after.

Recorded - Kingsway Hall, London, 12 & 13 August 1978