Prom 72 - BBCSO/Litton and Proms Composer Portrait - Harrison Birtwistle

There are two entrenched beliefs about Birtwistle's music. To his supporters he has produced a body of work that has confirmed his place as one of the greatest living composers. His detractors maintain that his oeuvre is noise rather than music - 'Emperor's New Clothes' and 'cacophony' are among the kinder epithets. The argument that is frequently made is that Birtwistle composes only nihilistic anti-music - a curious charge to make given that nihilism can be a feature of 'traditionalist' as well as 'modernist' music.

Having listened to works such as The Triumph of Time, Antiphonies and Pulse Shadows my own attitude was similar to Gavin Bryars' view on Brahms - moments I liked but rarely lasting as long as a whole piece. Amongst the cassettes of pieces I had recorded from previous BBC Proms, there was Exody. Somehow I kept returning to that piece, listening to it late at night. I wondered what it was that compelled me to listen again to the music when other works had left me cold. The fact that the tape had run out before the conclusion of the piece did not stop me from hearing it again and again. So when I learnt that Exody was to be performed at the BBC Proms this year I knew I had to go.

The preceding Proms Composer Portrait may have showcased only two pieces but they gave an insight into most facets of Birtwistle's musical personality from the angular and rebarbative (5 Distances for 5 Instruments) to the concise and delicate (selected Settings of Lorine Niedecker). The austere beauty inherent in the settings, wonderfully performed by the cellist Charles Hervet and soprano Alice Rose Privett, are a quiet rebuke to those who think that Birtwistle is only capable of brute gestures. It would have been wonderful to have heard those settings on Newsnight as part of the BBC's commitment to new music rather than broadcasting not just one but two pieces by Peter Maxwell Davies.

There was only the shortest of breaks between Vaughan Williams' Fantasia on 'Greensleeves' and the hushed opening of Exody. It didn't prepare all the members of the audience for the onslaught that was to follow. It commences with hushed strings punctuated by splashes of percussion. Then a volley of brass giving a bell-like summoning to a ritual. Even at its most dissonant the piece pursues a single theme. At times the music is fitful and remains in stasis. Occasionally parts of the theme are amplified to form the grandest of climaxes. At other times the melody is chopped up and divided among different instruments. The ear latches onto certain aspects for consolation - a solo saxophone here, a flute melody there. By the time the piece ends on the same hushed strings that open the piece, it is as if we are looking at a landscape whose broad contours remain the same and yet the fine details are fundamentally different and transformed. A four note motif in the strings is followed by a descent from G to F. It leaves behind a sense of anticipation and of hope.