Britten recital

Hall of St Botolph-without-Bishopsgate, London

21 November 2013

Britten's Canticle 1, performed by Anthony Rolfe-Johnson (tenor) and Graham Johnson (piano). 

From here.

A full performance of Winter Words would have been welcome, but this recital admirably conveyed the range of Britten's songwriting.

The Britten centenary has been celebrated vigorously all year, and is now reaching a fever pitch of concerts, radio broadcasts, etc. Like Shostakovich, Britten was overrated during his lifetime by those who wanted music that acknowledged modernism while remaining fundamentally comfortable.

Now though, the conflict between modernists and traditionalists (romantics, neoclassicists) seems misguided, and we can admire the romantic Ralph Vaughan-Williams quite as much as the atonal Harrison Birtwhistle.

Britten retains a prominent place as a music dramatist, the greatest in English opera by a large margin (competing only with the Gershwins and Rogers & Hammerstein). That isn’t meant to be damning with faint praise: in the last century English-language is the most illustrious form of contemporary music drama.

This remarkable free concert highlighted another of the composer’s strengths – his songs. The centrepiece, selections from his Winter Words, made me wonder why more composer haven’t been influenced by Schubert’s Winter Journey. Perhaps they have; perhaps I only know of Britten’s homage because I am British. In any case, it’s a benign influence and the work retains the potency of its predecessor.

Britten’s first Canticle, setting the obscure Jacobean poet Francis Quarles’ My beloved is mine, and I am his, is a little unsettling. It is obviously a love song to Peter Pears, who sang it and many other works, but is it exhibitionist, or prurient? And if we consider it ahistorically, is it really any good? I‘m not sure. It felt overlong.

The rest of the programme comprised lighter works, including the ever-popular arrangements of Purcell and folksongs.

Tenor Nicholas Allen has an appealing voice, and of course seemed influenced by the recordings of Pears in this repertoire, which can’t sensibly be a criticism. Pianist and mastermind Gavin Roberts joined Allen in providing helpful explanations of the songs and choices.

Britten and Haydn quartets

Bishopsgate Hall, London

29 October 2013

Gresham Professor Roger Parker's lecture on Britten's third quartet. Given in August 2013. From here.

Two masterpieces played with burning conviction.

This concert was so good I have trouble accepting that it was free, provided presumably for City bankers on their lunchbreak. I noticed none of those, unsurprisingly, but I felt that the 45-minute, two-work concert needed no further justification: it worked perfectly.

No doubt it mattered that the two pieces were string quartets, a medium optimised for that convivial tension we associate with chamber music.

This programme might have been devised by the musicologist Hans Keller, combining his two enthusiasms, for Haydn’s quartets and for Britten’s music in general. Indeed Britten’s valedictory third quartet is dedicated to Keller.

Almost any Haydn quartet is a joy, giving the impression that, while we listen to them, we cannot imagine being anywhere else, or wanting to listen to anything else. Opus 54, number 2 doesn’t disappoint, though it is unusual in placing a heavy burden on the lead violinist. Here, her performance was as ecstatic as the composer must have desired.

The serious finale is also unusual, and Keller, perhaps swept away with enthusiasm, claimed that Haydn pre-empts Mahler and Tchaikovsky in ending a ‘symphonic’ piece with a slow movement. More reasonably he suggests that Haydn was introducing the ‘French overture’ style to his ‘symphonic’ quartets.

I wouldn’t deny the quartets are symphonic but the much later adoption of slow movement finales is surely better thought of as a response to the ‘finale problem’ composers faced after adopting Beethoven's model. If a slow movement is going to carry the whole gravity of a work, where can it be placed?

In this quartet, as everywhere else except his symphony 88, Haydn doesn’t aim for a profound, soul-searching slow movement. Which isn’t to say the slow finale isn’t both lovely and a beautiful surprise. So the work as a whole deserves to be placed with French overtures rather than, say, Mahler's symphonies.

Britten’s work justifies Keller’s enthusiasm, at least in this performance. It also has a sombre finale, in this case very clearly the emotional focus of the work. By the end of it I was very nearly in tears, not a reaction I typically associate with his music.

We’re very used to a narrative of Britten’s earlier warmer sounding style being pared down in the late 1950s, and though true, I hardly find his earlier works to be abundantly emotional or warm. His later astringency seems a natural consequence of the repressed approach found in almost everything he did, as if exuberance or even openness was vulgar.

It seems different in this quartet. The ascetic sound remains, but the associations with Death in Venice here seem to fulfil that earlier opera, rather than simply recycling its themes. The opera emerges as a weaker expression of the quartet, rather than the other way round.

It’s too easy to suggest that Britten found it easier to express emotions through pure music, without words getting in the way but that’s what I felt when listening to this piece. Clearly I need to listen to it further.

I clearly also need to listen to more performances by the Jubilee Quartet.

Recital: Britten songs

Bishopsgate Institute Great Hall

22 October 2013

Maureen Forrester singing the Charm of Lullabies.

A nocturnal song cycle was the highlight of this committed survey of the composer.

The City Music Society somehow arranges free lunchtime recitals of impressive quality. This one was devoted to Benjamin Britten’s songs, commemorating his upcoming hundredth birthday. It was a very useful survey of this aspect of the composer, conveying a good sense of his strengths and weaknesses.

Britten is startlingly parochial, which makes little sense, as he was drew upon non-Western influences as well as non-British ones. Yet he returned to say, Purcell, or folk songs (both illustrated here) not in the spirit of promoting them or making them relevant to a modern (international) audience, but rather in a much more personal manner, as if trying to make them part of his own oeuvre.

It's as if he were a musical version of architect John Nash, looking upon the design of Mughal buildings as a blueprint for the Brighton Pavilion. That's harsh on Britten, who does a much better job of creating something   that can be appreciated internationally from his musical tourism.

The composer's clear, chilly style is especially well-suited to folk songs. I’m not sure the warmer Purcell benefits from being adapted by Britten, but the folk songs certainly do.

The cabaret songs are only a modest success, no patch on Weill/Brecht or even Eisler/Brecht, despite the fame of some of Auden’s verse (Funeral Blues) and Britten’s music (Tell Me The Truth About Love). I doubt either artist felt more than temporarily comfortable in this idiom. Bitterness, sarcasm, lust, political anger – none of this is really present in these charming but slight works.

The greatest work in this concert was the Charm of Lullabies. Night's mystery suited Britten perfectly, and he produced several song cycle masterpieces on the subject, including this one.

The lasting impression is one of death and darkness, without a trace of sentimentality, though mixed enough with charm, in charisma and magical senses, to prevent the mood souring completely.

Anna Huntley has a powerful mezzo voice, projected with great force, which sometimes threatened to be too much for this venue. But a dramatic approach works well with these songs; Britten was a major opera composer after all.

Britten: concert

Dances from the Prince of the Pagodas; Suite on English Folk Songs; Nocturne; Cello Symphony

Royal Festival Hall

2 October 2013

The masterful Nocturne, sung by Jerry Hadley. From here.

The Nocturne is a masterpiece, but other late works for concert hall are much less successful.

A collection of concert works with orchestra from Britten’s ‘late period’ from the late 1950s to the early 1970s. It’s the period when his sound changed, became more astringent, less appealing, though that needs qualification.

For Britten’s characteristic musical style, early or late, is something like a colder version of Debussy. His dread of sentimentality clearly went further than just a distaste of Puccini, or fear of becoming Puccini.

It’s this fear, and the underlying attraction to sentimentality that it fights against, that determines why his music sounds as it does. He attempts to combine Mahler with Debussy, which strikes me as doomed to fail, and a much worse choice than his contemporary Shostakovich, who wedded Mahler with Tchaikovsky.

Like Shostakovich, you feel a sense of kinship with the composer through his music. Britten emerges as a repressed hedonist.

The music of late Britten is not dark, contrary to the programme notes. It is etiolated, as if his earlier music had been aurally bleached or deprived of something life-giving.

I don’t mean it lacks vitality, or even interest; but we might reasonably regret, in the orchestral works at least, that the composer’s quest for refinement led to such little delight.

So unsurprisingly the most successful, and enjoyable, work here was the Nocturne song cycle. Always a great word-setter, Britten’s choice of texts fit his musical mood, and he created a magical complement to the equally fine earlier Serenade.

Mark Padmore sang beautifully, and has a fuller tone than the work’s dedicatee, Peter Pears (at least from recordings), though is equally comfortable with singing falsetto when needed.

He found more humour, I think, in the Midnight Bell central song than Pears did, but I’m not sure the variety worked – Nocturne is essentially an extended lullaby, creating a sense of delicate insomnia.

The Cello Symphony is also clearly a substantial work, but I found it uneven, and despite some very subtle quiet playing from the London philharmonic, I struggled to hear Truls Mørk’s cello, presumably intentionally recessed (repressed?) The work comes alive in the cadenza which leads to an energetic finale, almost lively.

The Suite on English Folk Songs, like Nocturne, shows off Britten’s late approach to orchestration, and like the Nocturne a series of miniature mood pieces plays to his strengths.

In contrast, I could scarcely stay awake during the excerpts from the Prince of the Pagodas ballet, which played to his weaknesses. An exotic tale, exotically orchestrated, ought to have inspired delightful music. Instead the drabness reminded me of the sea at Britten’s beloved Aldeburgh.