Dennis Brain

On 24 June 1936, Peter Pears joined his BBC Singers colleague, contralto Anne Wood, at Decca’s studio in Upper Thames Street in the City of London to make his very first commercial recording, of Peter Warlock’s setting of the Corpus Christi carol for unaccompanied voices. The year marked a turning-point for Pears: he met Benjamin Britten that April at the International Society for Contemporary Music festival in Barcelona, joined a vocal group, the New English Singers, and set off on his first trip to North America, on tour with them in November. This Warlock premiere makes its first ever appearance on Decca CD.

Of course, Britten’s Serenade for tenor, horn and strings is inextricably linked with Pears as well as with Dennis Brain, and marks one of the most important of all Decca premieres, particularly given the label’s association with both Britten and Pears. But also of interest are the recorded premieres of Britten’s British and French folk song arrangements by Pears (British folk songs) and the Swiss soprano Sophie Wyss (French folk songs) in the 1940s. All of these make their first appearance on Decca CD, the Sophie Wyss recordings added as a sort of ‘bonus’ midway through the (Pears) CD.

Vaughan Williams’s cycle On Wenlock Edge focuses more on the middle register of Pears’s voice (unlike the upper reaches in Britten’s Serenade). As with the Britten cycle, the first appearances of these recordings received glowing praise in the music press.

Paris in the twenties is conjured up in the witty Divertissement, whilst Escales paints pictures of sun-drenched Mediterranean ports. Film music for Chaliapin and Gene Kelly rubs shoulders with jazz and fugues in the music of the many-sided Ibert.

When Joan Sutherland died, many music critics commented on the quality of her voice in her early performances. The concert performances recorded here gave her the opportunity to deliver glorious singing without too many distractions. She was also able to collaborate with artists who she would not encounter in the opera house, such as Dennis Brain, heard here.

The cheapest, most attractively presented and most comprehensive single disc (78 minutes) of Dennis Brain in today’s market.

Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven, Schumann, Dittersdorf, Dukas and an excerpt from the Hoffnung Music Festival, 1956.

Newly re-mastered.

‘He was innately musical in a way which defies description or analysis. He shaped phrases with an instinctive rightness that seemed inevitable. Technical problems did not exist for him. He had tamed the most notoriously intractable of all instruments to be his obedient servant and raised it again to sing the song the sirens sang.’ Walter Legge

Vintage recordings of Peter Pears and Benjamin Britten (Winter Words and The Seven Sonnets of Michelangelo) and the 1953 recording of the Serenade with Dennis Brain.

Newly re-mastered.