Given the apparent tendency to record a contemporary composer's more recent works in preference to anything earlier, this Birtwistle retrospective is particularly welcome. Its origins in a live concert, in what the notes describe as Amsterdam's ''rock Temple'', ensure an expansive acoustic, even though the last degree of natural immediacy is lacking, and all the performances have a special concentration and vitality, as well as an impressive technical finesse: these Dutch ensembles, with their expert English conductor, have nothing to fear from comparison with leading French or British groups.
Refrains and Choruses (1957) is one of Birtwistle's earliest pieces, and there is already considerable character, and subtlety of form, despite the relative textural simplicity. Ten years or so further on, and with the experience of that explosive first opera Punch and Judy behind him, Verses for Ensembles is an assured yet far from forbidding exploration of the kind of abstract instrumental drama to which Birtwistle has returned in several of his finest works. There is a bite and exuberance in Verses which make it one of his strongest compositions, and this new version is a worthy alternative to David Atherton's London Sinfonietta recording (Decca Headline, 1/75—nla).
For O, for O, the Hobby-horse is Forgot is a line from Hamlet, in which the Prince of Denmark alludes to his dead father, so quickly forgotten by his mother. Birtwistle calls the work (composed for six percussionists in 1976) a ceremony, and it relates specifically to the play's ritual Dumb Show, with two of the percussionists personifying the Player King and Queen. It lasts some 20 minutes, and although, inevitably, there is a less richly developed musical argument than in Verses, the music still packs considerable dramatic force. In warmly commending this issue, I can only urge Etcetera to continue the good work by turning their attention to the many other Birtwistle scores that await a first recording. Few enterprises would be more worthwhile.'