Harrison Birtwistle's was the great creative story of the 1970s and 1980s in London, where most of his major works were introduced, and where he thrived with institutions that shared his sense of music's steady progress, notably the BBC and the London Sinfonietta. By the late 1980s he was a world figure.

Earth Dances

Quite how the Festival Hall could have been half empty for one of the most exhilarating concerts of the season is bewildering. Here was Stravinsky's grandest late monument, Threni, a fascinating double piano concerto by the master of expressionist surrealism, Bernd Alois Zimmermann, and the first big orchestral piece for fourteen years byHarrison Birtwistle.

Bruno Canino and Antonio Ballista were the quick-witted soloists in Zimmermann's Dialogue, which has a vast orchestra flickering with keyboard figuration, as if issuing from a dozen rainbow pianos, before the awesome entrance of ghost quotations from Debussy and Mozart. After a masterly exposition of this score Peter Eötvös conducted a beautifully calm performance of Stravinsky's liturgy of chance, dances and magic letters for the church of the lost god. Then came Birtwistle's Earth Dances, a thirty-five-minute sprawling, lumbering giant of a score that makes a quick verbal sketch more than usually irrelevant.