The Minotaur: Enthralling, hypnotising – and unloveable

Birtwistle_Minotaur.jpgRupert Christiansen [Daily Telegraph, 17 April 2008]
Ever since the story went round that Benjamin Britten had stormed out of the premiere of his first opera, Punch and Judy, Harrison Birtwistle has been cast as the bogeyman of modern music theatre, associated with a brutalist aesthetic infatuated with monsters, myths, masks, mime, murder and mayhem.