Down by the Greenwood Side
Music by Harrison Birtwistle
Down by the Greenwood Side is a "dramatic pastoral" composed by Harrison Birtwistle to a text by Michael Nyman. It was first performed on 8 May 1969 at the Festival Pavilion, West Pier, Brighton. The New York Philharmonic staged the opera as part of their New Horizons music festival in 1984 with conductor Larry Newland leading singers Susan Belling, Bruce Vernon Bradley, Richard Levine, John Lankston and James Billings. The text comes from two sources: a popular ballad called "The Cruel Mother", and passages from various mummers plays, the folk plays of the English countryside. The soprano, Mrs. Green, sings the ballad while the actors and mime perform the play. The two ingredients never meet; both are completely self-contained, involved only in themselves. But near the end, in the final tableau, there is a slight acknowledgement of each other's worlds when the presenter of the mummers' play, Father Christmas, completes the story Mrs. Green has been telling, and Mrs. Green momentarily enters the mummers’ acting area.
Text from the Wikipedia article "Down by the Greenwood Side (opera)", licensed CC BY-SA 4.0.
About the Composer
Sir Harrison Birtwistle (15 July 1934 – 18 April 2022) was an English composer of contemporary classical music best known for his operas, often based on mythological subjects. Among his many compositions, his better known works include The Triumph of Time (1972) and the operas The Mask of Orpheus (1986), Gawain (1991), and The Minotaur (2008). The last of these was ranked by music critics at The Guardian in 2019 as the third-best piece of the 21st century. Even his compositions that were not written for the stage often showed a theatrical approach. A performance of his saxophone concerto Panic during the BBC's Last Night of the Proms caused "national notoriety". He received many…
Text from the Wikipedia article "Harrison Birtwistle", licensed CC BY-SA 4.0.
Other Operas by Harrison Birtwistle
- Gawain (1991)