Posts tagged Benjamin Britten
266 plays
Benjamin Britten rehearsing Requiem aeternam from the War Requiem, London Symphony Orch. & Chorus, 1963.
(He sounds surprisingly like Stewie from Family Guy, not gonna lie…)
Benjamin Britten, Aaron Copland, and Peter Pears.
New York, 1939.
Britten
Rondo concertante for piano and strings (1930)
Rolf Hind, piano
Northern Sinfonia
Thomas Zehetmair
Well, the vote is in—and you’ve selected Sergei Rachmaninoff as the leading tone’s featured composer in the month of July. Join us on Sunday, 8 July for an all-day tribute in which we’ll hear some old favorites as well as a few works most are less likely to have encountered.
There was also enthusiastic support for the wonderful Benjamin Britten—the margin was just a handful of votes, though there were no hanging chads—so we’ll be visiting Britten’s music from time to time throughout the month, starting later today. Bayreuther says you should go check out Moonrise Kingdom—how did I not yet know about a new Wes Anderson film with an Alexandre Desplat/Benjamin Britten soundtrack? Off to the movies it is.
Thanks for your nominations and votes, and thanks for following!
Composing is like driving down a foggy road toward a house. Slowly you see more details of the house—the color of the slates and bricks, the shape of the windows. The notes are the bricks and the mortar of the house.
Benjamin Britten
Schubert - Winterreise (Winter Journey), D. 911
XVII. “Im Dorfe” (“In the Village”)
Peter Pears, tenor
Benjamin Britten, piano
The hounds are barking, their chains are rattling;
Men are asleep in their beds,
They dream of the things they do not have,
Find refreshment in good and bad things.
And tomorrow morning everything is vanished.
Yet still, they have enjoyed their share,
And hope that what remains to them
Might still be found on their pillows.
Bark me away, you waking dogs!
Let me not find rest in the hours of slumber!
I am finished with all dreaming:
Why should I linger among sleepers?
Schubert’s Winterreise was, after Die schöne Müllerin, the second of his great cycles on texts by Wilhelm Müller. “Come to Schober’s today,” Schubert told his close friend Joseph von Spaun, “and I will play you a cycle of terrifying songs. They have affected me more than has ever been the case with any other songs.”
Written in two equal halves at either end of 1827, Winterreise represents Schubert’s self-conscious labored struggle through the winter of his life. The settings are exquisitely sensitive and economical, delivering raw emotion in a way which indispensably illuminates the verse depicting a wayfarer’s harsh travels through the snow in search of the beloved.
In “Im Dorfe,” the pianist’s left hand imitates village dogs rattling their chains as they bark at the nameless transient.
89 plays
Schubert - Fantasy in F minor for piano four-hands, D. 940
I. Allegro molto moderato
II. Largo
III. Scherzo: Allegro vivace
IV. Finale: Allegro molto moderato
Benjamin Britten & Sviatoslav Richter, piano
Aldeburgh 1965
It isn’t every day that you get to hear Benjamin Britten and Sviatoslav Richter play a duet—but they played a concert of four-hands music at Aldeburgh in 1965, and this work was on the program.
Schubert finished this piece in 1828 and premiered it with his friend Lachner; the Fantasy is dedicated to Karoline Esterházy, a former pupil and burning love interest whose social standing placed her well beyond the struggling and sickly artist’s reach.
In many ways, the F minor Fantasy echoes the structure of the “Wanderer” Fantasy in C—there are four interconnected movements, and their themes are cyclically interdependent (though they are original, not derived from lieder). As in the “Wanderer,” here the last movement also opens with a stirring fugue.
(photo by Trevor Cotton)
Benjamin Britten at his piano in The Old Mill
Benjamin Britten and Peter Pears discuss Schubert’s Winterreise, 1968.
40 plays
Britten - Young Apollo for piano, string quartet, and string orchestra, Op. 16
Nikolai Lugansky, piano
Halle Orch., Kent Nagano, cond.
Benjamin Britten composed this lovely music for the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation just after coming to America in 1939, gave the premiere, and promptly withdrew it from his catalog. It had to wait forty years for a revival, which came with a re-premiere at the Aldeburgh Festival in 1979 with Britten’s friend Michael Roll as the soloist.
Benjamin Britten.
Benjamin Britten - Frank Bridge Variations
National Chamber Orchestra of Armenia, Aram Gharabekian, cond.
Benjamin Britten, Five Flower Songs, Op. 47
Cambridge Singers, John Rutter, cond.
They are presented out of order here, like so:
I. To Daffodils (Herrick)
V. The Ballade of Green Broom (anon.)
IV. The Evening Primrose (Clare)
III. Marsh Flowers (Crabbe)
II. The Succession of the Four Sweet Months (Herrick)
Regardless of the jumble, this is a technically flawless and musically inspiring rendition of these a cappella gems by Britten. The composer fearlessly demands textural and harmonic sophistication from the chorus; the text-setting is adventurous, but expertly so.
