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