Responses

This characteristically ever-evolving, single (29-minute) movement bears the remarkable title Responses: Sweet Disorder and the Carefully Careless, which is that of a book of essays by Birtwistle’s friend Robert Maxwell... The composer must not be “too precise in every part”, a frequent failing of the post-Schoenbergian serial music on which Birtwistle cut his teeth. But his own imagination has never subordinated itself to mathematics, and certainly doesn’t in this turbulent, scherzo-like, brilliantly multilayered score (a melodic thread always on hand to lead us through the maze of invention)... the soloist-and-tutti relationship, Birtwistle’s abiding concern, went into a dazzling new dimension.