RECORDINGS IN REVIEW: YOUNG BRITTEN

1 7 4 Y R E C O R D I N G S I N R E V I E W D E W E Y F A U L K N E R Benjamin Britten today is thought of almost entirely as a major opera composer, the first one writing in English since Henry Purcell . From the premiere of Peter Grimes at Sadler’s Wells on 4 June 1945 through that of Death in Venice on 16 June 1973, Britten created a series of operas on scales large (Billy Budd, Gloriana) and, more commonly, small (The Rape of Lucretia, The Turn of the Screw, the ‘‘church parables’’). Beyond and in conjunction with these, in 1948 he created a festival at Aldeburgh, a small town on the North Sea coast, for which he eventually acquired a disused brewery, the Maltings, at Snape, six miles south, and converted it in 1967 into a concert and opera hall. Here he could produce larger works, make recordings, and generally unify his festival labors. Most of his nonoperatic works after 1945 were intended for the Aldeburgh Festival and its many distinguished guest artists, although many can be performed by members of the general musical public as well. Stylistically, Britten never chased after the fashionable serialism of the 1950s and 1960s or any other unpopular modernist fad, which assured him continuing performances, publications, and royalties. The public has come to enjoy his music 1 7 5 R more and more since his death in 1976, and the commemorations for his 2013 birth centenary are numerous. Britten’s success was not automatic. Billy Budd, written for Covent Garden’s 1951 Festival of Britain celebrations, took years, major revisions, and a television production to win over the public, and Gloriana, commissioned for the coronation of Elizabeth II in 1953, was initially a failure, although it has since succeeded. It was not until the War Requiem in 1962, a commemoration work for the rebuilt Coventry Cathedral, that Britten’s stature finally was apparent to the public. It was confirmed internationally in the 1960s by his artistic associations with important Russian musicians: the composer Dmitri Shostakovich, the cellist Mstislav Rostropovich and his wife, the soprano Galina Vishnevskaya, and the pianist Sviatoslav Richter. The three performers would become major participants in the Aldeburgh Festival, with Britten writing important works for Rostropovich and Vishnevskaya. Recordings, particularly the highly successful 1963 recording of the Requiem, consolidated this. After 1963, every new work was an event, most recorded on Decca/London by the composer, and many older works entered the catalogue in new Britten-led, stereophonically recorded performances. Yet the War Requiem’s public looked for another Big Statement in vain. The three church parables, Death in Venice, and the Third String Quartet (1975), strongly influenced by Shostakovich’s last quartet (1974), are important pieces but all on a reduced scale. The di≈cult Cello Symphony , written for Rostropovich in 1963, was Britten’s last big orchestral piece, but it failed to achieve popularity for decades. It was a reminder of a prewar, nonoperatic Britten who had been a force in the concert hall but had ceased to be, other than on recordings he and other conductors made. That Britten undertook composing early, around the age of five. At fourteen he began studying with Frank Bridge, for whom he quickly wrote the Quatre chansons françaises, an accomplished set of texts for soprano and orchestra of poems by Victor Hugo and Paul Verlaine. Two years later he entered the Royal College of Music, where he studied with John Ireland, who o√ered him less than the concert environment of London did. Britten was soon composing mature pieces at a prodigious rate, including a ‘‘phan- 1 7 6 F A U L K N E R Y tasy’’ string quintet that won the Cobbett Prize, a double concerto for violin and viola, and a string quartet or two. His graduation piece was Sinfonietta, inspired by Arnold Schoenberg’s 1906 chamber symphony, without the expressionist angst. Graduation pushed Britten into the world of the Depression, so that supporting himself by composing was a priority. The thirties provided him with many new options...