Benjamin Britten
(1913-1976)
Violin Concerto; Cello
Symphony
What's in a name? Is
it just piquant coincidence that one of Britain's greatest composers was called
– Britten? Benjamin Britten's beloved mother certainly saw significance in her
married surname: extolling the 'three Bs' – Bach, Beethoven and Brahms – she
was 'determined' the fourth would be Britten. Benjamin was her fourth child,
born, auspiciously, on November 22nd – St Cecilia's Day, feast day of the
patron saint of music.
The future composer's
childhood home faced the North Sea in Lowestoft, the most easterly town in
Britain. Britten loved his native Suffolk, feeling 'firmly rooted in this
glorious county'; he could have added the words of fisherman Peter Grimes in
his most famous opera '…by familiar fields, marsh and sand, ordinary streets,
prevailing wind'. What drew Britten and his lover and muse, the tenor Peter
Pears, back from their new life in America in the early 1940s? Britten's
rediscovery of the Suffolk poet George Crabbe, whose The Borough inspired
Peter Grimes. Where did Britten and Pears settle? That very 'Borough',
Aldeburgh, another Suffolk coastal town which, thanks to Britten, has been home
since 1948 to one of Britain's finest music festivals. He found 'working
becomes more and more difficult away from that home'.
A quintessentially
English, provincial composer, then? Far from it. After Britten's death The
Times acclaimed him 'the first British composer to capture and hold the
attention of musicians and their audiences the world over'. Britten's technical
brilliance and openness to continental trends distinguished him from the start.
In the 1920s the precocious 13-year-old – pianist, viola-player and already
prolific composer (shades of Mozart) – was fortunate to find a composition
teacher in Frank Bridge, virtually the only British composer with a sympathy
for the central European avant-garde of Schoenberg, Berg and Bartók, or
neo-classical Stravinsky. To those models Britten added Mahler and Shostakovich. No
wonder the conservative Royal College of Music, which he attended from 1930,
suffered culture shock, especially when Britten proposed to use a travel grant
to study with Berg. (He didn't).
The mainstay of Britten's international appeal is the stream of operatic
masterpieces initiated by Peter Grimes in 1945; but they, and his other
Pears-inspired vocal music, mask further important creative strands: pieces for
young people and instrumental music. True, for a decade in mid-career Britten
wrote practically nothing substantial without voices; but before Grimes his
chamber and orchestral compositions outnumbered vocal works two to one; and
after 1960 musical friendships revitalised that interest. This recording
couples products of both 'instrumental' periods – kindred pieces, sharing
Britten's conviction that each (when he wrote it) was his finest, and roots in
his rapport with particular soloists.
The Spanish violinist Antonio Brosa met Britten through Frank Bridge in
the early thirties; following the Suite, Op. 6, the Violin
Concerto (1938-9, revised 1950s) was the second Britten piece Brosa
premièred – in 1940, Barbirolli conducting the New York Philharmonic at
Carnegie Hall. Started during the Spanish Civil War, finished four weeks into
the Second World War – when the pacifist Britten wrote, 'it's at times like
these that work is so important, that humans can think of other things than
blowing each other up' – the music is 'rather serious, I'm afraid'. Its dark
mood and tripartite structure, virtuosic scherzo flanked by more lyrical
movements, suggest another British violin concerto from 1938-9 first heard in
the non-combatant U.S.A. – Walton's; Britten's initial drum motif (a 'Spanish
rhythm', Brosa said) suggests a violin concerto classic – Beethoven's. This
rhythm survives the first movement's struggle, the violin's meditative opening
melody triumphing over its biting, would-be-military second theme. Wild, brilliantly-orchestrated, the scherzo hints
at Prokofiev, Shostakovich, even – in a flash of fantasy for two piccolos plus
tuba – Berlioz. Reconciling earlier conflict, the Cadenza launches the Passacaglia,
first of what became a favourite Britten form, unfolding over a repeated
bass – here introduced by trombones then stepping lower and changing each time.
The moving final fadeout, in a favourite Britten key, D – but major or minor? –
is 'impressive evidence,' for Peter Evans, 'of a command of absolute expressive
forms not fully realized until the Cello Symphony.'
By consensus Britten's
orchestral zenith, the Symphony for Cello and Orchestra (1963) recreates
the Cadenza-Passacaglia conclusion and focus on D; its inspiration,
dedicatee, champion, was the great Russian cellist Mstislav Rostropovich.
Rostropovich's British première of Shostakovich's Cello Concerto No. 1 in
1960 brought Britten new friendships with both composer and soloist;
Rostropovich's artistry – plus artful persuasive powers in his pidgin
'Aldeburgh Deutsch'(!) – drew more music from Britten than any other performer
save Pears: a sonata, three unaccompanied suites (recorded by Tim Hugh on Naxos
8.553663) and this 'Symphony'. Not 'Concerto': witness its four-movement form,
scant conventional solo virtuosity, and character: 'an argument on equal
terms', Britten said – like Frank Bridge's cello and orchestra Oration. Premièred,
appropriately, in Moscow, the Cello Symphony epitomises Britten's new
stylistic economy following his kaleidoscopic opera A Midsummer Night's
Dream and all-embracing War Requiem (Naxos 8.553558-59): everything
grows from the simplest intervals – seconds, thirds. Contrabassoon, tuba,
double basses, percussion below, keening woodwind above, the cello speaks
freely, eloquently. The eerie scherzo's ceaseless evolution contrasts
with the (for Britten) unusually strict sonata-form first movement, but
redoubles its tragic drama. The profound slow movement and Cadenza's common
themes germinate the Passacaglia's solo-led repeating bass and brilliant
D major trumpet melody, which kindle the glorious final apotheosis: darkness
into light.
David Gallagher