Sospeso presents Birtwistle's work La Plage, a setting of text by the French author Alain Robbe-Grillet, at the Sospeso Xponential concert on Tuesday, November 11, 2003.

Harrison Birtwistle is ‘the most forceful and uncompromisingly original British composer of his generation’ (The New Grove). He was born in Accrington, in the north of England, in 1934. Large-scale works from the past decade include the operas Gawain and The Second Mrs. Kong, the concertos Endless Parade for trumpet and Antiphonies for piano, and the orchestral score Earth Dances, which has been toured and recorded by Christoph von Dohnányi and the Cleveland Orchestra. Recent scores include The Cry of Anubis, for tuba and orchestra, and Panic, scored for saxophone, drummer and orchestra, which received a high profile premiere at the Last Night of the 1995 BBC Proms, with an estimated worldwide audience of 100 million.