Britten
David Nice
What a red letter day it is when a work you’ve always thought of as problematic seems at last, if only temporarily, to have no kind of fault or flaw. That was the case for me on Sunday afternoon with Britten’s penultimate opera, Owen Wingrave, launching this year’s Aldeburgh Festival with an ideal cast fused as one with the young Britten-Pears Orchestra thanks to the self-evidently intensive collaboration of director Neil Bartlett and conductor Mark Wigglesworth.Britten always demanded the highest standards of artists he could trust (and, as movingly described in a programme article by Read more ...
alexandra.coghlan
It takes a brave opera company indeed to stage Peter Grimes this summer. Benjamin Britten’s 2013 centenary celebrations took us to “peak Britten”, with performances of all his major works as well as the unprecedented, outstanding Grimes on the Beach. Then, this January, David Alden’s production of the opera returned to the Coliseum: direct, theatrical and if anything more potent than five years before. How then, could Grange Park – a David to the Goliaths of the Aldeburgh Festival and ENO – possibly compete?The answer, in Jeremy Sams’ quietly inventive production, is very well. Sams takes us Read more ...
David Nice
“Assez vu” (“seen enough”) is the first line of Benjamin Britten’s last Rimbaud setting in his electric song cycle Les Illuminations. Victor Hugo and Paul Verlaine had been the objects of his 14-year old attention in the Quatre Chansons françaises; later he made typically quirky arrangements of French folksongs. Les Illuminations has certainly been seen and heard enough in concert halls around Europe, even if you can never have too much of music as fresh as this. Britten loved the continent and the idea of the European Union. But have the French returned the compliment with stagings of the Read more ...
graham.rickson
Britten to America – music for radio and theatre Hallé/Sir Mark Elder, Ex Cathedra/Jeffrey Skidmore Samuel West (narrator) (NMC)The official catalogue of Britten’s music currently runs to 1183 pieces – so, besides the 95 works with opus numbers there’s an enormous amount which remains little-known. The works assembled here can’t be described as juvenilia. Not everything stands up to repeated listening, but much of the music is highly engaging. Britten’s score for Auden and Isherwood’s mountaineering drama The Ascent of F6 was written largely on the hoof, and he was exasperated by the Read more ...
Hanna Weibye
When three good choreographers can’t get a ballet right, there must be something wrong with either the story or the music. In the case of the Prince of the Pagodas (a Poirot mystery waiting to be written, that, but I digress), it’s hardly the music: Benjamin Britten’s gamelan-leavened, melodic score, his only for a ballet, is compelling. Of course, it hardly serves up Classic FM-worthy five-minute flower waltzes à la Tchaikovsky, Adam, Minkus et al, but then neither does Prokofiev’s Cinderella and that has no problem getting produced.So, story then. Both John Cranko in his 1957 original and Read more ...
Kimon Daltas
Paul Bunyan, best described as a "choral operetta", was Britten’s first foray into the operatic, and much of its value is surely gleaned through the prism of subsequent successes. The composer withdrew it after its poorly received US premiere in 1941, and its rehabilitation didn’t begin until over 30 years later. In its use of American folk and popular music styles, steadfastly melodic score and exploration of Americana, it was almost certainly bidding for a Broadway slot (interesting to imagine a parallel universe where Britten was embraced by the musical theatre world).Despite its appealing Read more ...
David Benedict
“Mind that door.” With the hurricane howling outside it’s no wonder the locals gathered in Auntie’s pub are yelling... but there is no door. Instead, a stage-wide sheet of corrugated iron rears up to let in Stuart Skelton’s storm-tossed Peter Grimes. Enlarging naturalistic, close-up detail into full-blooded, expressionist drama is typical of this frankly electrifying revival of David Alden’s revelatory production of Britten’s masterpiece. The fusion of sound and stage action in the very first moment makes it immediately clear that this production is operatic in the best sense. With the Read more ...
David Nice
This is great news. It should have been great news back in 2006-7, when Wigglesworth – Mark, not to be confused with the young, photogenic Ryan, composer and, when I last saw him, barely competent baton-wielder - was among the contenders for the post of Music Director at English National Opera. As it happened, the then relatively unknown Edward Gardner sailed into the job with precocious assurance and versatility.Gardner leaves at the end of the 2014-15 season to take up a post with the world-class Bergen Philharmonic Orchestra. Only his Mozart has been uncertain; but he has given us, among Read more ...
graham.rickson
A Festival of Britten National Youth Choirs of Great Britain (Delphian)Britten's 1961 Fancie opens this collection – a tiny, sublime choral coda to the opera A Midsummer Night's Dream. It lasts barely a minute, and you'll hopefully want to wind back and listen to it again. And again. Has any composer written so well for childrens' voices? One of the pleasures of this anthology of sacred and secular choral music is the prevailing positivity, a necessary reminder that Britten's output is not all darkness and sorrow. Eight different groups perform here, collectively under the banner of the Read more ...
David Nice
Which musical calendar year isn’t laden down with composer commemorations, too often a pretext for lazy and unimaginative planning? The last 12 months, with Verdi, Wagner and Britten as the birthday boys (in case you failed to hear), have raised the stakes.It looked on paper as if the BBC Proms were going for the obvious: all the major Wagner operas except The Flying Dutchman and The Mastersingers in semi-staged versions.The execution exceeded everyone’s wildest hopes (there, I’ve snuck in a collective top choice already). Now, it seems, is the time when opera is becoming the designer’s Read more ...
Iestyn Davies
“A cold coming we had of it,” grumble the three kings in T S Eliot’s poem “The Journey of the Magi” later set by Britten as his Canticle IV. “Just the worst time of year for a journey,” they complain, carried onwards by the ungulate bass notes of the piano. Barely 48 hours after having stepped foot on the harsh, wintry Russian soil my two travelling companions (Ian Bostridge and Peter Coleman-Wright) and I lined up on the stage of the Small Hall of the Moscow Conservatory and delivered Britten’s five Canticles, weary eyed and journey worn. One could say this was life imitating art, save for Read more ...
Mark Valencia
Never review the audience. Thus goes the dictum, so there’ll be no word from me about the cacophony of coughers who conspired to ruin the concert, no complaint about the woman with a video recorder, unchallenged by Barbican staff until the end of the evening, who drove those sitting near her to distraction, and no mention of the damage done to A Ceremony of Carols by the sizeable faction who shattered its charm by clapping at random intervals – an act that may conceivably have pleased today’s advocates of applause between movements but was ruinous to Britten’s blissful structuring.No, the Read more ...