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World premiere recording of the Axe Manual "one of Birtwistle’s most important recent works" (The Guardian) with all Birtwistle’s published piano music to date.
From the modal Oockooing Bird to the monumental Axe Manual, Harrison Birtwistle’s piano works stretch across his entire compositional career. Whether written for a large public forum or as occasional pieces for friends and family, all the works on this disc reveal a composer committed to exploring the sonorities and physicality of the modern piano in new and exciting ways.
The Axe Manual, a play on its commissioner Emanuel Ax, is a “manual” both in the sense that it is a sort of compendium of rhythmic devices and a manual of keyboards, piano, marimba and vibraphone. Harrison’s Clocks "is a kind of deconstructed clock", says Birtwistle.
"Clocks have many facets – set of layers of cogs moving at different speeds".
"A performance of pianistic poetry that catches the music’s dusky tone"
(The Times)
"Nicolas Hodges is an accomplished guide to these varied perspectives, never over-nuancing the understated poetry of the miniatures, but meeting all the technical and interpretative challenges of the larger works with total authority."
(Arnold Whittall for Gramophone, April 2005)
From the modal Oockooing Bird to the monumental Axe Manual, Harrison Birtwistle’s piano works stretch across his entire compositional career. Whether written for a large public forum or as occasional pieces for friends and family, all the works on this disc reveal a composer committed to exploring the sonorities and physicality of the modern piano in new and exciting ways.
The Axe Manual, a play on its commissioner Emanuel Ax, is a “manual” both in the sense that it is a sort of compendium of rhythmic devices and a manual of keyboards, piano, marimba and vibraphone. Harrison’s Clocks "is a kind of deconstructed clock", says Birtwistle.
"Clocks have many facets – set of layers of cogs moving at different speeds".
"A performance of pianistic poetry that catches the music’s dusky tone"
(The Times)
"Nicolas Hodges is an accomplished guide to these varied perspectives, never over-nuancing the understated poetry of the miniatures, but meeting all the technical and interpretative challenges of the larger works with total authority."
(Arnold Whittall for Gramophone, April 2005)