Benjamin Britten (1913-1976): Canadian Carnival • Violin Concerto
Britten / Lennox Berkeley (1903-1989): Mont Juic
Benjamin Britten’s post-war pre-eminence as an opera
composer has tended somewhat to overshadow the
considerable achievements of his earlier years. The
three works included on this recording all date from the
late 1930s at a time when Britten, then in his midtwenties,
was fluently and prolifically writing works in
every medium. Two lighter and still relatively littleknown
orchestral works here frame the Violin Concerto,
one of the most substantial and serious of the
composer’s instrumental scores.
In April 1939, keen to distance himself from some
personal issues at home and in any case happy to be
leaving what he felt to be the uncongenial artistic
climate in England, Britten, in the company of Peter
Pears, set sail across the Atlantic in search of fresh
opportunities in America. Before reaching their ultimate
destination, the two men spent a few weeks in Canada
where Britten attended a performance of his Frank
Bridge Variations given by the Canadian Broadcasting
Corporation. It was during this stay that Britten
conceived the idea for an orchestral work based on
French-Canadian folk-tunes. Originally planned as a
suite, it instead became a single-movement work
entitled Canadian Carnival (or Kermesse Canadienne),
which was completed in December 1939. The first
performance was given back in Britain as part of a radio
broadcast on the BBC Home Service in June 1940 with
Clarence Raybould conducting the BBC Symphony
Orchestra. As with the American Overture composed
some two years later, it seems that Britten was intent on
assimilating the recognisably American, ‘open-prairie’
sound associated above all with the music of Aaron
Copland. Indeed, Britten was in regular contact with
Copland at this time and the American composer’s
influence is apparent from the opening bars of
Canadian Carnival. Over a quiet roll on suspended
cymbals, a lone off-stage trumpet intones a nostalgic
fanfare-like theme, which is then taken up by various
wind and brass soloists as if sounding across vast
mountain distances. After a climax is reached, the
violins break in with a lively ‘alla danza’ idea
suggestive of a hoe-down. An expressive rising third on
the trumpets, echoed by horns and bassoons forms the
basis of a graceful new theme, marked Andante
amoroso, featuring paired woodwind and brass
instruments over a slow waltz-like accompaniment on
the harp. After reaching a climax, a mysterious
transitional episode featuring divisi muted violins over
quiet chords in the brass and harp leads to a somewhat
quirky treatment of the well-known folk-song
‘Alouette’, beginning quietly on the woodwind but
gradually increasing in volume and excitement to a
riotous climax. A maestoso return of the opening
trumpet melody on the full orchestra leads to an
abbreviated review of the opening material until the offstage
trumpet and cymbals sound once again, winding
the music down to a peaceful close.
For all its ebullience and brilliance of orchestral
colour, Canadian Carnival is essentially a jeu d’esprit
that does not find Britten working at full compositional
pressure. The same, however, could certainly not be
said of the Violin Concerto, one of the composer’s
finest works and one that fully stands comparison with
the violin concertos of Berg, Bartók, Prokofiev and
Shostakovich. Inexplicably, the work remained
relatively little-known during Britten’s lifetime and it is
only in recent years that its full value and significance
have come to be recognised. In April 1936, Britten had
attended the International Society for Contemporary
Music Festival in Barcelona where he had accompanied
the violinist Antonio Brosa in the first performance of
the Suite Op. 6. The festival programme also included
the posthumous world première of Berg’s Violin
Concerto, which made a deep impression on Britten. It
is tempting to infer that Britten might have been
inspired to compose his own concerto after hearing the
Berg performance, but apart from sharing a
predominately sombre, elegiac atmosphere, the two
works have little in common. A more urgent source of
inspiration for Britten was the rising tide of Fascism in
Spain and the worsening political climate which would
ultimately throw the country into civil war. In this
respect, the Violin Concerto follows in the line of a
number of other Britten works from this period,
including Our Hunting Fathers, the Ballad of Heroes
and the Sinfonia da Requiem, in which he gave artistic
expression to his growing awareness and anxiety at
developing world events. Britten began composition of
the concerto in November 1938 and completed it in
September of the following year. The first performance
was given on 28th March 1940 at Carnegie Hall in New
York with Brosa as soloist and John Barbirolli
conducting the New York Philharmonic. Britten made
some minor revisions, mainly with regard to the solo
part, in 1950 and 1954.
The first movement is a prime example of Britten’s
highly original re-thinking of sonata-form. The work
opens with a quiet rhythmic motif on timpani and
cymbals which, tranferred to bassoon and flutes,
underpins the soloist’s entry with the intensely lyrical
first theme. After a cadenza-like passage, this is taken
up by the orchestral wind. An abrupt change of texture
brings about an insistent repeated-note idea which in
turn serves as an accompaniment to the vigorous second
subject, played agitato ma espressivo on the soloist’s Gstring.
This too is developed by the wind. The highpoint
of the movement comes when the strings gently
reinstate the first theme, beautifully harmonized, while
the soloist superimposes a fusion of both
accompaniment ideas. The second subject is not
recapitulated, but the repeated-note figure returns in the
coda as a delicate counterpoint to the violin’s ascent in a
luminous glow of double-stopped harmonics. The
scherzo is a whirlwind of energy, ferociously difficult
for the soloist, with resourceful and incisive
orchestration, though the melodic material is almost
entirely derived from simple ascending and descending
scales. After a contrasting ‘trio’ section in which a
pleading motif from the soloist is continually undercut
by orchestral interjections of the scherzo material, there
is a bizarre transitional passage in which two piccolos
play a flickering ostinato while underneath, the tuba in
its lowest register reintroduces the scalic patterns from
earlier on, an astonishingly imaginative idea. A
powerful and menacing orchestral tutti leads into an
extensive cadenza which functions as a résumé of
thematic material heard thus far while also forging a
link to the final Passacaglia which is begun with
solemn dignity by the trombones making their first
appearance in the work. A series of variations follows,
widely varied in mood and character. After a sustained
Largamente climax brings about a decisive resolution
onto the tonic D, there is a long drawn-out and
hauntingly beautiful coda in which sequences of slowmoving
orchestral chords are answered by the violin’s
impassioned lament which finally trails off with a high
trill on the notes F sharp and F natural so that neither the
major nor minor mode is established – in 1938, with the
world situation hanging in the balance, the future was
unknown.
The Barcelona excursion also provided the
inspiration for the short orchestral suite Mont Juic,
which Britten composed in collaboration with Lennox
Berkeley in 1937. Britten met Berkeley during the mid-
1930s through their mutual friend, Peter Burra (Burra,
to whose memory Mont Juic is dedicated, was tragically
killed in an aircraft crash in April 1937) and during this
period, the two men were on close terms: they shared
Britten’s home at the Old Mill in Snape, Suffolk, for a
time and Berkeley was Britten’s travelling companion
to the ISCM festival where his own Domini est Terra
was due to be performed. The idea for the suite was
inspired by a display of folk-dancing that the two
composers witnessed in Mont Juic, the site of the 1929
International Exhibition on a hill near the city. The
result was this witty, attractive and infectious score,
based on a pot-pourri of various Catalan folk-tunes. The
two composers chose not publicly to divulge which
movements were written by whom, but Berkeley later
told the composer Peter Dickinson that the first two
movements were mainly his and the third and fourth
mainly Britten’s, though, as Berkeley’s note to the
published score states, both composers had a hand in
determining the form and orchestration of each
movement. After the first broadcast performance by the
BBC in January 1938, Berkeley wrote to Britten with
characteristic modesty, saying ‘I must say that I thought
your two pieces more effective than mine’. Certainly
the most substantial movement is the third, subtitled
Lament (Barcelona, July, 1936), a clear reference to the
dark clouds gathering over the country’s political
horizon. This movement features a prominent solo for
alto saxophone, an instrument that Britten also used to
similar elegiac purpose in Our Hunting Fathers,
Sinfonia da Requiem and, somewhat later, in the opera
Billy Budd. The central section of the movement is
based on the Catalan national dance the Sardana. The
other three movements are slighter in conception but are
full of vivid and lively invention. It is puzzling that this
delightful and brilliantly orchestrated score is not
performed with more frequency.
Lloyd Moore