A Bag of Bagatelles - Piano Works by Birtwistle and Beethoven review | Andrew Clements's classical album of the week

The Guardian 0

Nicolas Hodges
(Wergo)
Hodges’s cool virtuosity emphasises the links between two composers of muscular intricacy and resonance

For the first 40 years of his composing career, Harrison Birtwistle wrote no major works for solo piano. There were a few miniatures, beginning with Précis, composed in 1959 for his college contemporary John Ogdon, but nothing substantial until the late 1990s, when he wrote the three-movement Harrison’s Clocks. Since then there have been two more hefty piano pieces, Gigue Machine from 2011, and the Variations from the Golden Mountain, completed three years later.