Harrison Birtwistle: Ancora

The Triumph of Time is one of Birtwistle's most memorable images in sound: an immensely slow and baleful processional for vast orchestra, inspired by Breughel the Elder's engraving of the same name depicting Time as a remorseless destroyer.
Birtwistle's 1992 opera Gawain was another of his large-scale treatments of the passing of time, and his orchestral paraphrase Gawain's Journey draws together music from various parts of the opera round its turning point of Gawain's journey northward from the court of King Arthur to fulfil his wager with the mysterious Green Knight. These two works are joined by a reissue of the London Sinfonietta's recording of Ritual Fragment, also released on NMC D009.

Recordings originally released on Collins Classics. Reissued with funding from Arts Council England.

"It is good to have [these] excellent recordings of two of the composer's major orchestral works resurrected from their Collins Classics grave by the ever-welcome new-music specialist label NMC."
The Daily Telegraph 2004