Signum: SIGCD122

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.