This September marks twenty years since Birtwistle’s Panic received its now famous world premiere at the Last Night of the Proms. To celebrate, a new recording of the work is released on Metronome, pairing it with the piano concerto Antiphonies as well as the lesser known works Slow Frieze and Crowd.
Writing in The Guardian, Andrew Clements praises saxophonist Marcus Weiss’s “raw, in-your-face vividness and explosive energy” but says it is Nicholas Hodges’s performance of Antiphonies that “proves the biggest revelation here”, describing the work as “more intensely, involvingly dramatic than ever heard before”.
This latest recording adds to the near complete catalogue of Birtwistle works on disc.
