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28 pp booklet, essay and sung texts
Britten was a prolific composer of songs throughout his creative life, producing over 100 settings for voice and piano, in addition to the works for voice and orchestra. His songs for voice and piano – of which this is the first in a two-volume 4CD cycle, contain settings by poets as diverse as Michelangelo, Hölderlin, Hardy, Pushkin, Auden and Soutar.
The earliest songs date from 1922, when Britten was just nine years old – ‘Beware!’ and two other songs were from this period were reassessed by the composer in 1968, but not published until 1985. These rarities display little of the mature composer’s style, but they are confident and charming settings. The touching ‘Lilian’ and ‘The Joy of Grief’ are also early songs and receive their premiere recordings here. Mature Britten is represented by the Holy Sonnets of John Donne, Winter Words and the 1965 cycle The Poet’s Echo.
This survey of all Britten’s songs for voice and piano is a major project, and Malcolm Martineau has assembled some of the finest young singers of our time for this fascinating journey through repertoire that spans the period 1922–1971.
To lie flat on the back
Night covers up the rigid land
A dirge
Virtue in deeds not words
Prithee
Lucy
Canticle I
Um Mitternacht
Menschenbeifall
Die Heimat
Sokrates und Alcibiades
Die Jugend
Hälfte des Lebens
Die Linien des Lebens
Oh my blacke soule!
Batter my heart
O might those sighes and teares
Oh, to vex me
What if this present
Since she whom I loved
At the round earth's imagined corners
Thou hast made me
Death, be not proud
Calypso
Tell me the truth about love
Johnny
Funeral blues
A song of enchantment
Autumn
Silver
Vigil
Tit for tat
Beware
Oh that I'd ne'er been married
Eptitaph: The clerk
Lilian
The joy of grief
Echo
My heart
Angel
The nightingale & the rose
Epigram
Lines written during a sleepless night
At day-close in November
Midnight on the Great Western
Wagtail and baby
The little old table
The choirmaster's burial
Proud songsters
At the railway station
Before life and after
28th May 2011
***
“Martineau paces his survey of Britten’s songbook with the same lightly worn expertise he brings to his accompaniments, alternating lighter and darker material, innocent and knowing, in a way that maintains the listener’s interest.”
29th May 2011
****
“Martineau has gathered a gratifyingly formidable array of young British singing talent. Ben Johnson is commanding in an urgent, passionate reading of The Holy Sonnets of John Donne. Andrew Tortise conveys rapturously intense emotions in Canticle I...Perhaps the best is left until last, when Robin Tritschler gives a fresh-sounding Winter Words.”
12th June 2011
“The John Donne sonnets (Ben Johnson) and The Poet's Echo (Katherine Broderick) are very fine, but the most compelling track is "Canticle 1", a masterpiece powerfully delivered by Andrew Tortise.”
August 2011
****
“James Geer, a tenor with an instinct for the inflection of poetry that matches the composer's own, offers 'A Dirge'...Katherine Broderick brings by turns a forlorn beauty and a fiery plangency to the Pushkin settings of The Poet's Echo...We have a tiny and tantalising glimpse of tenor Nicky Spence...O that I had ne'er been married...a touching and memorable gem within this auspicious first volume.”
September 2011
“Among so many potential successors to Peter Pears...two tenors stand out: Robin Tritschler, who gives a performance of exceptional tenderness in the ever-popular Winter Words, and Ben Johnson, whose string and intense singing of the Holy Sonnets of John Donne nails his colours to the Britten mast with impressive authority...As always, Malcolm Martineau's accompaniments are a constant source of inspiration on the journey.”
Click on any of the works listed above for alternative recordings.
To lie flat on the back
