Bregenz Festival: Birtwistle Double Bill

The Corridor freeze frames the devastating moment when Orpheus turns to look back at Eurydice as they leave the underworld, and he loses her forever. "I'm obsessed with the myth of Orpheus" says Birtwistle "I see The Corridor as a single movement from the Orpheus story magnified, like a photographic blow-up. I've thought of it as virtuosic, close up chamber theatre, with the London Sinfonietta musicians in the action as well as the singers."

The passionate melancholy of Elizabethan master John Dowland's music is another of Birtwistle's obsessions. In Semper Dowland, semper dolens (always Dowland, always doleful' was Dowland's own, punning description of himself), Birtwistle arranges Dowland's Seven Teares Figured in Seven Passionate Pavanes and intersperses them with new music and Dowland songs.