Benjamin Britten

Mozart, Britten & Dohnànyi - Chamber Music

Their performance of Mozart's Oboe Quartet, a highly virtuosic and original work shows a different side to these musicians, highlighting their subtlety and lightness of touch. The arrangement for oboe and violins of three arias from ‘The Magic Flute’ was originally set for two violins, while only the cor anglais part has survived from the Adagio, K580. In addition to the seldom-heard 1902 Serenade by the Hungarian composer Ernst von Dohnányi, Benjamin Britten's ‘Phantasy Quartet’ presents a rhapsodically-toned masterwork for the combination of oboe, violin, viola and cello

Britten - Who are these Children?

This Britten recital combines two of the composer’s major song cycles, Winter Words, from 1953, and Who are these Children? (1969). In them he explored themes of loneliness, transcience and war – difficult and harrowing material which would test any composer, but Britten is equal to the challenge. His music works its magic by bringing out poignant emotions and subtle insights, sometimes even more vividly than the texts on their own. The music’s emotional depth is grounded in compelling, quasi-naturalistic sound images, such as the whistling, rattling train in the setting of Thomas Hardy’s Midnight on the Great Western. Providing a lighter note between these gripping works are four settings of poems by Robert Burns, containing some of Britten’s most deft and delicate music. Composed on the request of Queen Elizabeth II in 1975, they originally formed part of a set of six songs for high voice and harp, and were later arranged for piano by Britten’s assistant Colin Matthews.

Britten: Owen Wingrave

Following the success of his recent performance of the opera at London’s Cadagon Hall, the seasoned Britten performer Richard Hickox has committed the composer’s rarely recorded Owen Wingrave to disc. Only one rival CD recording is available at present. Commissioned by BBC television in 1966, the work is something of a Cinderella among Britten’s operas, despite its imaginative, closely knit score. One possible reason is that it was composed for television rather than the theatre. Like its 1954 predecessor, The Turn of the Screw, Owen Wingrave is based on a ghost story by Henry James. Britten read the story while he was working on The Turn of the Screw, and even then conceived the idea of setting it as an opera. The music employs the relatively spare textures that Britten adopted in his later years.

The Best of Britten

The outstanding English composer working in the mid-20th century, Benjamin Britten won a significant international reputation, whilst remaining thoroughly English in inspiration. Britten’s compositions appeal to all ages, from the delightful Simple Symphony, composed for a school orchestra, and The Young Person’s Guide to the Orchestra written for an educational film, to the haunting Serenade for Tenor, Horn and Strings and the intense anti-war statement of his War Requiem

Britten: Albert Herring

The Royal Theatre, Copenhagen - September 15, 1949

Libretto by Eric Crozier and Directed by Basil Coleman

This live recording is of a performance given by the English Opera Group, conducted by the composer in the Theatre Royal, Copenhagen on 15th September 1949. It is a fascinating document, coming, as it does, only two years after the first performance of the opera and with no less than eleven members of the original cast still in the team. The composer’s studio recording of Albert Herring was not made until 1964, and, excellent though it is, by then Peter Pears was the only role-creator still in the cast. All limitation of the sound quality aside, this is a wonderful survivor and one of the earliest recorded examples of Britten and the EOG in performance.

Britten Abroad

Britten's settings of Italian, Russian, French and German, performed here by Susan Gritton, Mark Padmore and Iain Burnside are certainly amongst the most distinctive and very finest examples of his art, each fashioned specifically for a much-loved and favoured artist. The Seven Sonnets of Michelangelo were completed in America in October 1940 and were the first songs written specifically for Britten's life-long partner and principle interpreter, the tenor Peter Pears, to whom they are dedicated and unquestionably addressed. Britten and Pears premiered the Michelangelo Sonnets at the Wigmore Hall on 23 September 1942, the first of many memorable appearances they were to make in London's premiere recital hall over the next three decades. The Poet's Echo was written during a holiday that Britten and Pears spent in the Soviet Union with Galina Vishnevskaya and Mstislav Rostropovich in August 1965.The cycle is dedicated to 'Galya and Slava' and was first performed by the dedicatees in the Small Hall of the Moscow Conservatoire, on 2 December 1965; they gave the UK premiere on 2 July the following year, in London's Royal Festival Hall. Um Mitternacht was written around 1960. It was first performed by the soprano Lucy Shelton and pianist Ian Brown at the 1992 Aldeburgh Festival and only entered the repertory with the publication of The Red Cockatoo & Other Songs by Faber Music in 1994. It is unique in that it's Britten's only setting of Goethe, an anthology of whose verse he received around this time from his friend Prince Ludwig of Hesse and the Rhine, the dedicatee of the final song-cycle on the present disc, the Sechs Hölderlin-Fragmente. Britten and Pears recorded them for the BBC Third programme on 20 October 1958.

Christine Brewer

Opening concert of the 2007/8 Wigmore Hall season Notes on the encore by Christine: ‘A City Called Heaven’ negro spiritual I grew up in a family of singers, many of whom sang gospel music. My brothers and I quite often joined our mother in the church to sing gospel music and spirituals. This music has always been an important part of my life, so I try to include spirituals in my programs whenever I can. I find in the spirituals that no matter what the obstacles are, there is a deep underlying sense of hope and joy. This is what draws me to such music and gives me such joy to sing. ‘Ich liebe dich’ Richard Strauss: This is one of the many Strauss lieder that I have sung for years, and that Roger and I have performed and recorded. This song also exudes such utter joy that it's difficult not to just want to burst out in laughter at the end of it. It has one of the most exuberant postludes of any of Strauss' songs, and I love it! ‘Mira’ Bob Merrill: I started performing Mira about 20 years ago when I did little recitals and concerts around St. Louis. This song spoke to me right away, because it is about a girl who is missing her hometown where everyone knows her name. I grew up in a town of 500 and now live in a town of about 3,500, so I truly know what it is like to walk down the street and know most of the townspeople. There is a comfort in that for me, and I miss it when I am travelling around the world. I think I sang this song as an encore the very first time that I sang at the Wigmore Hall. It became one of Bill Lyne's favourites and he asked me to sing it at his farewell concert. So it has become a standard for me at the Wigmore, and one that always makes me think of home and all those folks there as well as my friends here in London when I sing it!