Sunday Classics: With the full symphony orchestra you can create a heckuva storm (aka: Musical storms, part 2)

There are funny storms too! Alexander Prior conducts the deliciously raging thunderstorm in Act II of Rossini's Barber of Seville at the Chuvash National Opera in the Volga River port of Cheboksary, capital of Russia's Chuvash Republic, November 2009. We've got some better performances coming up in the click-through.

As music lovers know, the hint of a distant storm from a few timpani rolls can be as evocative as the crepuscular waves portrayed by Constable. The ability of music both directly to mimic the sounds of the weather and indirectly to imply its subtler moods perhaps gives this medium more scope for dramatic expression than the visual arts and literature, which unavoidably are limited to more literal interpretations.

-- Karen L. Aplin and Paul D. Williams,
in "Meteorological phenomena in Western classical
orchestral music," in the November issue of Weather

by Ken

Just for the record, the authors of the above-cited monograph hail from the Dept. of Physics, University of Oxford (Aplin), and the Dept. of Meteorology, University of Reading (Williams). If that gives you a gnawing bad feeling, trust it. When I discovered the piece, I thought at first it was a happy coincidence that such a piece had been published just as I was setting out to write about musical storms. Then I started reading the piece. And I was reminded why I rigorously avoided taking any academic classes that impinged on my love of music. If you were thinking there was bound to be some fun in such a piece, so was I. We were all wrong.

Anyway, we began listening to our storms imagined in music a couple of weeks ago, leading off with probably the most celebrated from the concert repertory, the sequence from Beethoven's Pastoral Symphony that includes his famous thunderstorm, and surely the most spectacular storm in the operatic repertory, the cataclysm that opens Verdi's Otello -- and nearly rings down the curtain on the opera when Otello's ship is nearly dragged under as it approaches the Cypriot shore. For good measure we threw in a less threatening operatic storm, the beautiful "Royal Hunt and Storm" sequence from Berlioz's epic opera The Trojans.

In Friday's preview we took a step back in time to hear what Vivaldi could do stormwise with just the modest baroque orchestras -- incorporating storm movements in three of the Four Seasons. Today we track what some composers have done with the increasingly resource-rich resources of the modern symphony orchestra.

One perhaps obvious observation is still worth observing: that there's not much point in doing a musical storm if you don't also provide a sort of musical "baseline" -- life as it was being carried on before the storm and as it continues afterward. Beethoven, for example, gave us his countryside peasants dancing merrily before the interruption of the weather event, and then the the merry-making that follows it. The storm itself is brief, but illustrates thrillingly the cleansing, purifying, and exhilarating effect a storm can have. Just to refresh our memory, why don't we listen again to the Klemperer recording with the slow "Peasants' Dance" that producer Walter Legge very likely never did get used to.

BEETHOVEN: Symphony No. 6 in F, Op. 68 (Pastoral):
iii. Merry gathering of the peasants: Allegro
iv. Thunderstorm: Allegro
v. Shepherd's song; Happy and grateful feelings after the storm: Allegretto

Philharmonia Orchestra, Otto Klemperer, cond. EMI, recorded October 1957

I thought of including the "Scene in the fields" from Berlioz's Symphonie fantastique, which we listened to in June 2010), itself a clear hommage to Beethoven's thunderstorm. But the distant thunder near the end seems kind of incidental for our purposes. In that 2010 post you can hear a quite lovely performance of the movement by Paul Paray and the Detroit Symphony.

Okay, you talked me into it; here's the Paray "Scene in the fields" again. Just as a reminder: The composer's program for the movement concludes: "The sun retires . . . distant noise of thunder . . . solitude . . . silence . . ."

BERLIOZ: Symphonie fantastique, Op. 14:
iii. Scène aux champs (Scene in the fields)

Detroit Symphony Orchestra, Paul Paray, cond. Mercury, recorded Nov. 28, 1959


LET'S MOVE ON TO A REAL STORM, THE CLIMAX
OF FERDE GROFÉ'S GRAND CANYON SUITE

Again, we've heard the Grand Canyon Suite in its entirely, in a July 2010 Fourth of July post. At this point in the piece we've witnessed an awesome musical "Sunrise" and the spooky "Painted Desert," ridden our burros "On the Trail," and watched the "Sunset." You never know when you may be caught in a cloudburst.

GROFÉ: Grand Canyon Suite:
v. Cloudburst

Eastman-Rochester Orchestra, Howard Hanson, cond. Mercury, recorded May 1958

Pittsburgh Symphony Orchestra, Lorin Maazel, cond. CBS/Sony, recorded Sept. 30, 1991

RECORDING NOTE: I know there's a resistance among many modern listeners to "old" recordings like these. It still seems to me that the recording art has gone mostly backward, not forward, since, say, the late '60s. If anyone has heard an orchestral recording made in the last 20 years remotely comparable in sonic beauty or believability to the 1958 and 1959 Mercury recordings we've just heard, I'd sure like to know what it is.


COMING UP: STORMS BY RICHARD STRAUSS,
GRIEG, BRITTEN, AND ROSSINI -- CLICK HERE

(And, oh yes, we've also got a storm-pretender from the Waltz King, Johann Strauss II.)

SUNDAY CLASSICS' MUSICAL STORMS

Preview: Tonight's musical selections should give you a good idea of Sunday's subject (January 13)
The thunderstorm movement from Beethoven's Pastoral Symphony and Otello's "Esultate" from Verdi's Otello
Stormy weather, part 1 (January 15)
Verdi's Otello, Beethoven's Pastoral Symphony, and Berlioz's Les Troyens, plus Lena Horne singing "Stormy Weather"
Preview: Given the resources at his disposal, Vivaldi's musical storms may be the most remarkable of all (January 27)
The three storm movements from Vivaldi's Four Seasons
With the full symphony orchestra you can create a heckuva storm (aka: Musical storms, part 2) (January 29)
Beethoven's Pastoral Symphony (again), Berlioz's Symphonie fantastique, Grofé's Grand Canyon Suite, Johann Strauss II's Amid Thunder and Lightning polka, Richard Strauss's Alpine Symphony, Grieg's Peer Gynt incidental music, Britten's Peter Grimes, and Rossini's Barber of Seville
Preview: En route to more of our musical storms, we encounter perhaps the most eerily wonderful music I know (February 3)
The Preludes to Acts I and II of Wagner's Siegfried
Storms that set three great operatic scenes in motion (aka: Musical storms, part 3) (February 5)
The openings of Wagner's Die Walküre Act I and Siegfried Act III and of Act III of Puccini's La Bohème
Preview: En route to our final operatic storms, we hear two famous tenor tunes sung by a very famous tenor (February 24)
"La donna è mobile," the Quartet, and the Storm Scene from Act III of Rigoletto
Musical storms, part 4: We come to our raging storms from Janáček's Kátya Kabanová and Verdi's Rigoletto (February 26)
The storms from Act III of both operas, with a close-up look at how Verdi created the Rigoletto one -- plus the whole of Act III

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[1/29/12] With the full symphony orchestra you can create a heckuva storm (continued)

BEFORE WE CONTINUE, LET'S DISPOSE OF ONE
FAMOUS MUSICAL STORM THAT REALLY ISN'T

J. STRAUSS II: Unter Donner und Blitzen (Amid Thunder and Lightning), Op. 324

This breathless little polka is understandably one of the Waltz King's best-loved works, but despite all that supposed thunder, the thing has never sounded very thundery or lightningy to me. Carlos Kleiber (sort of) conducts the Bavarian State Orchestra in Tokyo, May 1986.


WE HEARD VIVALDI CONJURE STORMS WITH A MERE
BAROQUE ENSEMBLE. HERE'S . . . RICHARD STRAUSS

If there's a wizard among orchestral wizards, surely it's Richard Strauss. I imagine his basic position to have been: If it can be done with an orchestra, I can do it. Sometimes he seems to have taken on just this sort of thing as a personal challenge. A "day in the life" at home? Can do -- the Symphonia domestica. An arduous mountain ascent and descent? Sure thing -- An Alpine Symphony.

Because the Alpine Symphony in particular is so expertly written, it's grand fun for the performers to perform, perhaps more fun (it has sometimes seemed to me) than for listeners. Still, when the performers are skilled enough and engaged enough, the results can be surprisingly persuasive. Curiously, Georg Solti and Herbert von Karajan recorded the piece about a year apart, and I think the results --very different, I think you'll note -- occupy special places in these conductors' mammoth discographies. I had no idea when I grudgingly bought the Karajan that I would listen to it as often as I have.

In our Alpine adventure there is, not surprisingly, a fair amount of weather detail. Here, for example, is a wisp of a fragment that occurs late in the piece, after the climber has reached the summit. I should warn that since Strauss's symphonic "program" is continuous, fragments ripped out of context really sound it.

R. STRAUSS: An Alpine Symphony, Op. 64: Mists rise; The sun gradually dims

Bavarian Radio Symphony Orchestra, Sir Georg Solti, cond. Decca, recorded 1979

Berlin Philharmonic, Herbert von Karajan, cond. DG, recorded December 1980

A coupe of minutes later we're set up for one of the great musical storms. We can trust that Strauss was familiar with all those earlier efforts, and was surely confident that he could have his own say.

R. STRAUSS: An Alpine Symphony, Op. 64: Calm before the storm; Thunderstorm, Descent; Sunset

Bavarian Radio Symphony Orchestra, Sir Georg Solti, cond. Decca, recorded 1979

Berlin Philharmonic, Herbert von Karajan, cond. DG, recorded December 1980

Now we're going to hear the complete sequence, including the little in-between "Elegy" we haven't heard yet. Again, bear in mind that the Alpine Symphony is musically continuous. While the concertgoer would presumably be provided with a list of the section identifiers, there would be no artificial separations like our unwieldy track changes. Since the Telarc Alpine Symphnony indexes rather than tracks these points, in our format it comes out musically continuous, which for us effectively "takes the training wheels off" and lets us hear this sequence as the composer expected the whole Alpine Symphony to be heard.

(I might also note quickly that in our four recordings of this orchestral display piece we're hearing four of the world's preeminent Strauss orchestras. I've noted before when we've dipped into it that the extensive series of Strauss orchestral works by Rudolf Kempe and the Staatskapelle Dresden seems to me on all counts one of the most impressive projects in the history of orchestral recording -- though the CDs don't seem to me to have done it justice.)

R. STRAUSS: An Alpine Symphony, Op. 64: Mists rise; The sun gradually dims; Elegy; Calm before the storm; Thunderstorm, Descent; Sunset


Staatskapelle Dresden, Rudolf Kempe, cond. EMI, recorded December 1972

Vienna Philharmonic, André Previn, cond. Telarc, recorded Nov. 22-24, 1989


COMPOSERS FOR THE STAGE MAY HAVE TO DO STORMS FOR
DRAMATIC PURPOSE -- LIKE MR. GRIEG AND MR. BRITTEN

We already heard in the earlier post two prime theatrical specimens: the violent opening scene of Verdi's Otello and the very different storm in Berlioz's Trojans which serves as the occasion for the, er, coming together of Dido and Aeneas.

Here's a storm we've heard before, in February 2010 as part of the Peer Gynt Suite No. 2. It had been composed with the large quantity of incidental music the composer provided for Ibsen's play, where it served as the prelude to Act V. (Which reminds me that one of these days we still have to do a post on Grieg's incidental music in theatrical context.)

GRIEG: Peer Gynt (incidental music): Prelude to Act V: Peer's Homeward Journey (Stormy Evening at Sea)

NARRATOR: Peer Gynt, by now a vigorous old man with hair gray as ice. Stormy crossing and homecoming.

Friedhelm Eberle, narrator; Gewandhaus Orchestra (Leipzig), Kurt Masur, cond. Philips, recorded March 1988

Berlin Philharmonic, Jeffrey Tate, cond. EMI, recorded March 1990

Gothenburg Symphony Orchestra, Neeme Järvi, cond. DG, recorded June 1987

Straddling the line between "concert" and "stage" storm is the violent interlude Britten composed to bridge the two scenes of Act I of Peter Grimes, which has an important theatrical function but has taken on an active concert life as part of the understandably popular suite of Four Sea Interludes (with or without the Passacaglia) from Peter Grimes. (In the suite of interludes it's placed last, for fairly obvious reasons, I think.)

We've heard the 1973 Bernstein "Storm" Interlude before, in a November 2009 Britten post along with the other three interludes. I failed to point out then that Lenny had a history with Peter Grimes. In 1946, at age 28, he conducted the American premiere of the opera, at the Tanglewood Festival. The Sea Interludes were also on the program for his final concert, in August 1990 -- at Tanglewood. I thought we might hear that notably broader performance too. We lead off with a violently impassioned performance by an unexpected Brittenite, Carlo Maria Giulini (who was later asked by the composer to conduct his War Requiem).

BRITTEN: Peter Grimes, Op. 33: Act I: Storm Interlude: Presto con fuoco -- Molto animato -- Largamente -- Tempo I


Philharmonia Orchestra, Carlo Maria Giulini, cond. EMI, recorded c1963

New York Philharmonic, Leonard Bernstein, cond. Columbia/CBS/Sony, recorded Mar. 8, 1973

Boston Symphony Orchestra, Leonard Bernstein, cond. DG, recorded live at the Tanglewood Festival, Aug. 19, 1990

To really appreciate how Britten musicalizes this storm and how it's woven into the action of the opera, we need to back up a bit into Act I, Scene 1, as the approach of the storm is registered, and then listen a bit into Act II, as the storm batters "the Borough" -- on England's Suffolk coast -- at hurricane force. (We performed a similar exercise with the first interlude, "Dawn," which joins the Prologue and Act I, in our November 2009 Britten post.) We're only venturing about a minute into Scene 2, but that's long enough to appreciate how Britten handles the storm. As pretty much the whole of the Borough finds its way into the Boar inn, even though Auntie is trying to close for the night, each time the door opens the storm churns again in the orchestra until the storm refugees manage to get the door closed again.

BRITTEN: Peter Grimes, Op. 33, Act I Scene 1, The storm is here; Storm Interlude; Scene 2 beginning

ACT I, Scene 1 has taken place in the street in the Borough in front of the Moot Hall (where, in the Prologue, a coroner's inquest into the death of the fisherman Peter Grimes's young apprentice took place), the Boar inn (run by "Auntie"), and the shop of the apothecary Ned Keene, opposite breakwaters that run to the sea. Locals wandered in and out of the scene amid growing indications of an approaching storm. At this point the retired merchant captain Balstrode has been encouraging Grimes, still held responsible for the death of the boy despite being spared indictment at the inquest, to leave the Borough. Peter, imagining marrying the kindly schoolteacher Ellen Orford, resolves instead to stay.

CAPTAIN BALSTRODE: The storm, the storm is here, o come away!
PETER GRIMES: The storm is here, and I, and I shall stay!
[BALSTRODE leaves PETER and goes into the Boar. PETER alone -- gazing intently into the sea and approaching storm.]
What harbour shelters peace,
away from tidal waves, away from storms?
What harbour can embrace terrors and tragedies?
With her there'll be no quarrels,
with her the mood will stay
a harbour evermore,
where night is turned to day.
[CURTAIN]

Storm Interlude

Scene 2
Inside the Boar, the same night. AUNTIE is admitting MRS. SEDLEY. The gale is now at hurricane force and they push the door shut with difficulty.

AUNTIE: Past time to close!
MRS. SEDLEY: He -- he -- he said half past ten.
AUNTIE: Who?
MRS. SEDLEY: Mister Keene.
AUNTIE: Him and his women!
MRS. SEDLEY: You referring to me?
AUNTIE: Not at all, not at all!
What do you want?
MRS. SEDLEY: Room from the storm.
AUNTIE: That is the sort of weak politeness
makes a publican lose her clients.
Keep in the corner out of sight.
[BALSTRODE and some of the fishermen enter. They struggle with the door.]
CAPTAIN BALSTRODE: [Whistles] That's a bitch of a gale all right.
AUNTIE: Sh-h-h!
CAPTAIN BALSTRODE: Sorry, I didn't see you, Missis.
You'll give the regulars a surprise.
AUNTIE: She's meeting Ned.
CAPTAIN BALSTRODE: Which Ned?
AUNTIE: The quack! He's looking after her heart attack.
CAPTAIN BALSTRODE: Bring us a pint.
AUNTIE: It's closing time.
CAPTAIN BALSTRODE: You fearful old female, why should you mind?
AUNTIE: Th-e-e-e-e storm!
[BOB BOLES and some other fishermen and women enter. The wind howls through the door.]
BOB BOLES: Did you hear the tide has broken over the North Road?
[The window shutters blow open.]
CAPTAIN BALSTRODE: Get those shutters!

Donald Gramm (bs-b), Captain Balstrode; Jon Vickers (t), Peter Grimes; Lili Chookasian (c), Auntie; Jean Kraft (ms), Mrs. Sedley; Paul Franke (t), Bob Boles; Metropolitan Opera Orchestra, John Pritchard, cond. Live performance, Dec. 10, 1977

Anthony Michaels-Moore (b), Captain Balstrode; Glenn Winslade (t), Peter Grimes; Jill Grove (c), Auntie; Catherine Wyn-Rogers (ms), Mrs. Sedley; Christopher Gillett (t), Bob Boles; London Symphony Orchestra, Sir Colin Davis, cond. LSO Live, recorded live in concert at the Barbican (London), January 2004


LET'S WIND IT UP FOR TODAY BY GIVING A PROPER
HEARING TO ROSSINI'S RIB-TICKLING TEMPEST

I'm not sure this storm serves any dramatic purpose -- I mean as a storm. As an interlude, it definitely allows the action time to percolate and set up the opera's grand climax. But as a storm specifically, well, it can provide the stage director with the opportunity to create some (usually hokey) visual effects.

I made two new files for this post, and the Naples and Bucharest ones, and then discovered that I'd already made one of the New York performance, which I don't think we actually heard -- I think that was for another post that's still to come. I really like the hammed-up Leinsdorf performance (I don't think Rossini necessarily meant this storm to be subtle), but I acknowledge that Varviso has as much fun with his straighter approach. Finally, there's a special breath-of-life quality to the Romanian Barber recording from which we hear the storm.

ROSSINI: The Barber of Seville:
Act II, The Storm

Metropolitan Opera Orchestra, Erich Leinsdorf, cond. RCA/BMG, recorded 1958

Orchestra Rossini of Naples, Silvio Varviso, cond. Decca, recorded c1964

Orchestra of the Romanian Opera, Bucharest, Mihai Brediceanu, cond. Electrecord/Vox, recorded 1960-61


STILL TO COME: MORE OPERATIC STORMS WOVEN INTO THE
ACTION -- LIKE ANOTHER BY VERDI AND ONE BY JANÁČEK

Maybe next week. Or maybe the week after -- it's hard to say with scientific precision.


RETURN TO THE BEGINNING OF THE POST

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Sunday Classics: "Lo! An angel called him out of heaven" -- another peek at the sound world of Benjamin Britten

Rembrandt's "Sacrifice of Isaac" (in the Hermitage)

Lo! an angel called him out of heaven,
Saying, Lay not thy hand upon the lad,
Neither do anything to him. Behold,
A ram, caught in a thicket by its horns;
Offer the Ram of Pride instead of him.

-- from Wilfred Owen's "Parable of the Old Man and the Young"
(used in the Offertorium of Britten's War Requiem)

by Ken

I. THE WAR REQUIEM:

"SO ABRAM ROSE"

In our previous Sneak peek into the sound world of Benjamin Britten (1913-1976), one of the works we looked at a bit was the War Requiem composed for the rededication of the rebuilt Coventry Cathedral, of which the original had been bombed out in 1940, in 1962. We even heard a bit of the War Requiem, though not the bit I really wanted you to hear.

By the time of the Coventry commission, the British had mostly made peace with the stark fact that their greatest composer since, well, at least since Purcell, but in fact since forever, was this man who was and yet wasn't quite one of them, who was English to the core and yet somehow an outsider.

Two obvious factors not only epitomized his alienness but would each automatically have disqualified him from being considered a proper English gentleman: He was homosexual, and he was a pacifist. When he and his partner Peter Pears made the decision to return to England from the U.S. in 1942, they knew they would be confronted immediately with the issue of the draft. The more Britten agonized with it, the more sure he seems to have become that he could not in good conscience kill. His appeal for conscientious-objector status was very public, and while it was eventually accepted, it was also remembered. The "warrior" self-image, though often comical, is kind of central to British manhood in the best of times; at a time when the country was still hostage to German rockets and bombs, pacifism didn't sit well. And that male partner of his didn't enhance his qualifications for conventional British manhood.

For the Coventry commission, though, Britten began to seem like the perfect choice, especially when he revealed his plan: a major choral piece that would intersperse the standard Latin Requiem text with poems by the great English pacifist poet Wilfred Owen, who had felt conscience-bound to serve in World War I, and was killed by enemy fire at Joncourt in the north of France on November 4, 1918, a week before the armistice went into effect ending the war. Britten managed to make a package of the carnage of the two world wars, with its rapidly growing technological prowess, and the terror of the new nuclear age.

The Owen poems would be sung by soprano, tenor, and baritone soloists, accompanied by a chamber orchestra, which in many performances calls for a conductor of its own. (In the early performances, in fact, the composer conducted the chamber orchestra and soloists.) As a demonstration of multinational intent, the solo parts were written for the Russian soprano Galina Vishnevskaya (the wife of cellist Mstislav Rostropovich, one of Britten's most cherished musical colleagues), Britten's partner Peter Pears, and the German baritone (yes, even the instigators/vanquished of the world wars were included!) Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau, though the Soviet government refused to allow Vishnevskaya to participate in the premiere, no doubt spooked by this gay pacifist peace propaganda. (Fortunately, saner heads prevailed in the Kremlin in time for Vishnevskaya to sing in the recording made in January 1963.)

The section of the War Requiem that concerns us is the roughly 10-minute Offertorium, which falls smack in the middle of the piece (which runs a bit under 82 minutes in the composer's recording). The Offertorium comes in two parts: first the Domine Jesu Christe, then the Hostias.

OFFERTORIUM

1. Domine Jesu Christe, Rex gloriae
Lord Jesus Christ, King of Glory,
deliver the souls of all the faithful
departed from the pains of hell
and from the depths of the pit; deliver
them from the lion's mouth, that hell
devour them not, that they fall not into darkness.

[Sed signifer sanctus Michael]
But let the standard-bearer Saint Michael
bring them into the holy light:
which of old Thou didst promise
unto Abraham and his seed.

2. Hostias et preces tibi, Domine
We offer unto Thee, o Lord, sacrifices
of prayer and praise: do Thou receive
them for the souls of those whose memory
we this day recall; make them, O Lord,
to pass from death unto life,
which of old Thou didst promise to Abraham
and his seed.

The Latin text set by Britten is so standard that as far as I can see it is identical to that used by Mozart and Verdi, allowing for the optional repeat of the phrase "which of old Thou didst promise unto Abraham and his seed," from the end of the Domine Jesu Christe, at the end of the Hostias. Mozart repeats it; Verdi doesn't. Britten repeats. Boy, does he repeat! With regard to the basic text, there's rather more variety in the settings of Berlioz and especially Fauré.

[CORRECTION: Sorry, don't know what I was thinking, but Verdi repeats the Abraham promise too, just like Mozart and Britten. I must have been overly focused on trying to find a place to mention the breathtaking tenor solo with which Verdi launches the Hostias -- especially as sung by Jussi Bjoreling in our clip below.]

Now any composer undertaking a new setting of the Requiem stands at the end of a line that includes forebears as intimidating as these. Come to think of it, why don't we hear how they handled this section?

OTHER SETTINGS OF THE OFFERTORIUM

MOZART: Requiem, K. 626 (ed. H. C. Robbins Landon):
Offertorium: Domine Jesu; Hostias

Arleen Auger, soprano; Cecilia Bartoli, mezzo-soprano; Vinson Cole, tenor; René Pape, bass; Vienna State Opera Concert Chorus, Vienna Philharmonic, Georg Solti, cond. Decca, recorded live Dec. 5, 1991 (200th anniversary of Mozart's death)

VERDI: Messa da Requiem:
Offertorio: Domine Jesu; Hostias

Leontyne Price, soprano; Rosalind Elias, mezzo-soprano; Jussi Bjoerling, tenor; Giorgio Tozzi, bass; Vienna Singverein, Vienna Philharmonic, Fritz Reiner, cond. RCA/Decca, recorded 1959

BERLIOZ: Grande Messe des morts, Op. 5:
Offertorium; Hostias

New England Conservatory Chorus, Boston Symphony Orchestra, Charles Munch, cond. RCA/BMG, recorded Apr. 26-27, 1959

FAURÉ: Requiem, Op. 48:
Offertoire

John Carol Case, baritone (in the Hostias); BBC Chorus and Symphony Orchestra, Nadia Boulanger, cond. Live performance, November 1968

Britten wasn't intimidated by this challenge. (Or if he was, he didn't let it stop him.) First he had the inspiration of using his boys' choir, distant and ethereal, to invoke God in the first section of the Domine Jesu and the whole of the Hostias. Then he detected a change of voice in the Domine Jesu, at the line "Sed signifer sanctus Michael." This is where the main chorus takes over from the angelic boys, eventually launching a fugue at mention of the promise to Abraham and his seed.

Most crucially, of course, Britten pounced on that promise to Abraham and his seed. The story of Abraham and Isaac clearly had resonance for him; he had written a church canticle on the subject in 1952. (He borrowed a theme from it for the "Quam olim Abrahae" fugue.) And he seized this opportunity to insert the astonishing Wilfred Owen poem "The Parable of the Old Man and the Young":

So Abram rose, and clave the wood, and went,
And took the fire with him, and a knife.
And as they sojourned, both of them together,
Isaac the first-born spake, and said, My Father,
Behold the preparations, fire and iron,
But where the lamb for this burnt-offering?
Then Abram bound the youth with belts and straps,
And builded parapets and trenches there,
And stretched forth the knife to slay his son.

When lo! an angel called him out of heaven,
Saying, Lay not thy hand upon the lad,
Neither do anything to him. Behold,
A ram, caught in a thicket by its horns;
Offer the Ram of Pride instead of him.
But the old man would not so, but slew his son,
And half the seed of Europe, one by one.

The poem is set for the baritone and tenor soloists, launched by the baritone using the tune of the fugue triggered by the promise to Abraham. For this setting Britten borrowed a trick he had used in the Abraham and Isaac canticle, where the alto soloist spoke Isaac's lines and the tenor Abraham's, and the two together represented the voice of God. Here the baritone handles the narration and lines that belong to the father; the tenor handles lines referring to the son; and the call of the angel is represented by a haunting chorale of tenor and baritone, which reaches dazzling heights on the line "Behold, a ram," as the angel points out an alternative sacrifice the old man can offer to God.

And here Wilfred Owen offers his horrifying twist. Abram has already signaled his willingness to sacrifice his son -- and here we might wonder what sort of psychotic, sociopathic God would think to ask such a monstrous sacrifice. Is that a God to be worshipped or reviled? (Eventually the Christians would get into the act and embroider the psychosis and sociopathology by deciding that God in fact sacrificed his son. See? Nothing to it!)

Britten didn't attempt a big, blood-splattering setting of the line in which Abram slays "half the seed of Europe, one by one," Owen's invocation of the then-unimaginable carnage of World War I (before he himself became one of its last victims), a catastrophe that scarred the psyche of Europe -- but didn't prevent Europeans from doing it all over, on an even more brutal scale, a mere two decades later. What he did was to bring his angelic boys back to intone the "Hostias," offering up "sacrifices of praise and prayer," along with, as the soloists keep insisting, "half the seed of Europe, one by one."

Here's how the whole thing plays in the composer's recording:


Peter Pears, tenor; Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau, baritone; Highgate School Choir, Bach Choir, Melos Ensemble, London Symphony Chorus and Orchestra, Benjamin Britten, cond. Decca, recorded January 1963

I've never been all that happy with this performance, and in particular with this section of it, what with Pears sounding so otherworldly and Fischer-Dieskau, well, fischer-dieskau-ing his bloody way through the lines, and the whole of the Offertorium seems, well, surprisingly bloodless. I couldn't say I was much happier with the alternatives, though, until Kurt Masur, who had already recorded the War Requiem in New York, got a second crack at it in the London Philharmonic's own live-performance series. I'm a lot happier with this:


Anthony Dean Griffey, tenor; Gerald Finley, baritone; Tiffin Boys' Choir, London Philharmonic Choir and Orchestra, Neville Creed and Kurt Masur, cond. LPO, recorded live May 8, 2005

II. PETER GRIMES: HOW "DAWN"

LINKS THE PROLOGUE AND ACT I

Britten's volume of viable operatic output is the largest since Richard Strauss's, and it's hard to imagine anyone approaching it. We've talked about Peter Grimes, and last night I offered a glimpse of the totally different sensory world he created for his adaptation of Henry James's ghostly Turn of the ScrewI've been pressing the Peter Grimes Sea Interludes on you for months now, in particular the first of them, "Dawn," which links the Prologue and Act I of the opera. I think we need to get a feeling for how the interludes function in context.

If you want to take one last listen to the "Dawn" interlude by itself, Leonard Bernstein's 1973 recording with the New York Philharmonic is just a click away in Friday's preview. Now for the context.

The Prologue to Peter Grimes begins with an inquest into the storm death of the young apprentice of the much-disliked local fisherman Peter Grimes. When the widowed schoolteacher Ellen Orford testifies that on the night in question she did what she could to help, and the lawyer Swallow asks, "Why should you help this kind of fellow -- callous, brutal, and coarse?," we know a lot about the relationship between the community and "this kind of fellow," Grimes.

The death is finally ruled accidental, but Grimes is cautioned not to get another boy apprentice, to have an adult fisherman assist him, which Grimes points out is economically impossible. ("Like every other fisherman, I have to have an apprentice.") Peter, well aware that he doesn't fit in with the gossipy, interfering villagers, is left bemoaning the injustice, and Ellen tries to encourage him. The "Dawn" interlude slides in just at the end of the Ellen-Grimes scene, and at the other end gives way to the village's morning awakening routines.

Jon Vickers as Peter Grimes

Heather Harper (s), Ellen; Jon Vickers (t), Grimes; John Pritchard, cond. Live performance, Dec. 10, 1977

Peter Pears as Grimes in the 1969 BBC TV production

Claire Watson (s), Ellen; Peter Pears (t), Grimes; Royal Opera House Orchestra, Covent Garden, Benjamin Britten, cond. Decca, recorded December 1958

III. BRITTEN'S PARTING GIFT:

THE THIRD STRING QUARTET

I think it's generally accepted that the massive stroke that disabled Britten once he had completed his last opera, the Thomas Mann adaptation Death in Venice, was brought on in part, or at least precipitated, by the race-against-death effort he was making to finish it, while already seriously unwell.

I've told this story before, but it still gives me a shiver. It was generally supposed that Britten had been reduced to a vegetative state. My first inkling to the contrary came in a report in High Fidelity magazine by European correspondent Ted Greenfield (music critic of The Guardian), in which he reported that the ghostly presence felt watching over the next Aldeburgh Festival, the composer's and Peter Pears's pet project, was no ghost, but the reclusive composer himself, keeping an eye on things while taking advantage of the privacy afforded by the general supposition of his incapacitation.

Having been found out, Britten even consented to an interview, in which he revealed that he had in fact resumed composing. It wasn't a long reprieve he had been granted, but in that time he composed some remarkable music, notably the cantata Phedre, written for mezzo-soprano Janet Baker, and his Third String Quartet, written for the Amadeus Quartet.

The Third Quartet is a haunting piece, and inescapably also a reflection on death. It's strange how Britten's musical world converges at the end with that of his friend Dmitri Shostakovich (1906-1975), whom he outlived by not quite 15 months. As Shostakovich's access to the West increased, the two great composers developed a warm relationship, based on enormous admiration for each other's music. Shostakovich too had said his farewell in a string quartet, the ghostly 15th. Some of you may recall that the twisty road into this piece was my insistence, way back when, that we have already had our last three great composers, and that they are Igor Stravinsky (1882-1971), Shostakovich, and Britten, who through the sheer force of their creative personalities managed to wring what seems to me the last bit of juice out of the exhausted old harmonic language, for which we have yet to find more than tiny-stopgap extensions or alternatives.

(Let me say once again that the exhaustion of the musical language in place at any particular time doesn't seem to have any effect on the viability of what's already been written. It just seems to limit the extent to which anything more can be wrung out of that collection of parts.)

Which I guess makes the Britten Third Quartet just about the end of the line. I'm not going to say anything more about the piece. Let's listen as a warmup to the first and third of its five movements, "Duets" and "Solo," then hear the whole thing played by the dedicatees of the piece, the Amadeus Quartet.

BRITTEN: String Quartet No. 3, Op. 94

i. Duets

Endellion Quartet (Andrew Watkinson and James Clark, violins; Garfield Jackson, viola; David Waterman, cello). EMI, recorded Jan.-May 1986

iii. Solo

Britten Quartet (Peter Manning and Peter Lale, violins; Keith Pascoe, viola; Andrew Shulman, cello). Collins, recorded October 1989

i. Duets
ii. Ostinato
iii. Solo
iv. Burlesque
v. Recitative and Passacaglia: La Serenissima

Amadeus Quartet (Norbert Brainin and Siegmund Nissel, violins; Peter Schidlof, viola; Martin Lovett, cello). Decca, recorded March 1978

SUNDAY CLASSICS POSTS

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Sunday Classics follow-up: Is Shostakovich overrated?

This is an interesting test. Here we have the first ten minutes of the third-movement Adagio of Shostakovich's Seventh Symphony (in Leonard Bernstein's second recording,with the Chicago Symphony, the full movement runs an unusually long 19:25), one of the most intensely felt pieces of music I know. It's a tortured elegy I would describe as a witness or memorial to victims everywhere -- victims of war, of privation, of oppression. But you get to decide for yourself what you hear, including whether it's anything for Joe Stalin to smile about.

by Ken

In my recent Sunday Classics "sneak peek" at the music of Benjamin Britten, I repeated my previously stated view that in Stravinsky, Shostakovich, and Britten we have our "last three great composers."

As I wrote originally in connection with Stravinsky:

I really want to talk about Stravinsky one of these days, and I plan to get to it really soon. Awhile back I startled Howie by saying that we've already had the last three great composers we're ever going to have--Stravinsky (1882-1971), Dmitri Shostakovich (1906-1975), and Benjamin Britten (1913-1976), all now long since safely dead and buried. This seems so obvious to me now that I forget how stark it may sound to others. But these are the last composers who seem to me, through the sheer force of their imagination, to have transcended the exhaustion of the musical language they inherited, or could scrounge up or invent.

I wish I saw a way around this, but after all these years of creative scavenging, I simply can't imagine where any aspiring composer is going to find a musical language in which to create music that has the power to stimulate and pleasure us in the way we've come to expect from the great achievements of Western classical music. What these last three great composers did was to take the musical language they inherited, which had been pretty well used up in the first half of the 20th century and, through the sheer force of their individuality, and with it produce additional bodies of top-quality work.

I should probably acknowledge here that bundling Stravinsky with these younger colleagues gives me pause, because the music of his that I love is almost all relatively early, and really didn't stretch much more than a decade beyond the "exhaustion" point if we date it at roughly the gaping cultural divide of World War I. While there's much that I admire, or appreciate, or anyway respect in the later Stravinsky, if we're talking about the period from the end of World War I to the immediate post-World War II period, there are any number of composers who produced more music that I love than he did -- names pop to mind like Bela Bartok and Richard Strauss and Sergei Prokofiev and Alban Berg.

Again this is ground I would really like to come back to, to try to make a more coherent and explicit case. For now I just want to deal with a comment added to Sunday's post by reader Frank Wilhoit concerning one of my "last great composers":

I think we may all have overrated Shostakovich somewhat. Now that we live in a totalitarian environment ourselves, his reaction to totalitarianism no longer seems as noble as it once did, but subjective and pitiful. We have now been forced to acknowledge that anything created in a totalitarian environment is axiomatically and absolutely worthless, totally invalidated before it is even conceived.

I began by simply adding a comment-reply, but decided the question of whether Shostakovich is overrated deserved to be pulled out of the comments section -- and this is the one place in the world where I've got the clout to do it.

I kept looking for some indication that this is some sort of ironic statement and not Frank's actual view:

"We have now been forced to acknowledge that anything created in a totalitarian environment is axiomatically and absolutely worthless, totally invalidated before it is even conceived."

Surely there isn't anyone who actually believes this, is there? But my irony detector has come up blank.

"At Babi Yar there is no memorial," begins the Yevtushenko poem that begins Shostakovich's overpowering 13th Symphony (1962), growled by the choral basses in their lower range, punctuated by chimes that in the late Kyril Kondrashin's performances sounded unmistakably like the knell of death. In the course of the time when the Soviet regime was suppressing the piece, this statement became factually untrue; a memorial of sorts was installed. But is the significance of what happened at Babi Yar either remembered or understood? Any more than we will remember what happened at Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo?


The able bass Mikhail Petrenko was a late replacement for this August 2006 Proms performance, in the Royal Albert Hall, of the Shostakovich 13th Symphony by the Mariinsky Theater Chorus and Orchestra under Valery Gergiev. We hear most of the first movement ("Babi Yar"). [Here is an English translation of the Yevtushenko poem.]

For me, Shostakovich's greatness as an artist has nothing to do with some presumed "nobility." It's a product of his availability and sensitivity to the world around him, his insight into the human condition, and the brilliant array of musical resources he brought to bear to transform what he observed and felt into music of ever-increasing resonance. Again, listen to the Adagio of the Seventh Symphony.

The relationship of Soviet citizens to the Soviet regime and the relationship of Soviet artists to both are fascinating and complex subjects, and they are inescapable in the understanding and appreciation of Shostakovich's music. But they don't define or explain that music in any simple way.

For starters, I can't imagine anyone who has lived with the 15 string quartets giving even a second's thought to the notion that Shostakovich is overrated. Under-rated? Perhaps. But overrated? Let's get serious. After Beethoven's quartets, there's nothing remotely comparably in the musical literature. Ironically, these most deeply felt and intimately expressed works may well be the composer's most accessible, because in chamber music he had less need than in more public forms to hide or camouflage his artistic concerns. (We heard another deeply expressive Shostakovich Adagio, that of the Third String Quartet, in the Sunday Classics post on the path from the Borodin Quartet to the Borodin Trio.)

The 15 symphonies are a much more diverse proposition, including as they do so many different kinds of artistic undertakings. Since we've already heard a bit of the Seventh -- a profoundly misunderstood piece, I should warn -- I might direct music lovers to Shostakovich's monumental pair of wartime symphonies, the Seventh and Eighth, which not only are spirit-shaking masterpieces in their own rights but together form a fairly overwhelming super-symphony.

To that we might perhaps add, by way of something completely different, the comparatively minuscule symphony that followed immediately, the irrepressibly impudent Ninth. The Ninth Symphony formed the subject of Leonard Bernstein's Young People's Concert"Humor in Music."

Georg Solti, a surprisingly sympathetic Shostakovich conductor who made a hugely powerful recordingof the gritty Eighth Symphony with the Chicago Symphony, here conducts the jaunty opening movement of the Ninth, with the Bavarian Radio Symphony in 1992.

Marshal Stalin himself is said to have had a personal interest in the Shostakovich Ninth Symphony. He kept a close eye on the composer after Shostakovich's rehabilitation following his first official denunciation by the Stalin regime in 1936. The great leader is said to have been miffed that neither of the monumental wartime symphonies, the Seventh and Eighth, was dedicated to that greatest of Soviet heroes, himself. He was led to believe, we're told, that they would be followed by a comparable mighty work, which would complete a symphonic triptych and be suitable for dedicating to so august a personage. If so, the great man was likely not amused by the actual Ninth Symphony when it was unveiled in November 1945, and he heard what we just heard.

Shostakovich was a pianist, and a whole other side of his personality comes to the fore when he's writing for his instrument. Now in our own living rooms we can not just hear but actually watch the remarkable pianist Tatiana Nikolayevaplay Shostakovich's Op. 87 set of 24 Preludes and Fugues (1950-51), obviously referencing Bach's Well-Tempered Clavier. Here you can hear but not see her play No. 1 in C major. (In this trailer you can see just the Prelude of No. 17 in A flat major.) And when it comes to looking death squarely in the puss, perhaps the only composer who has done so as eloquently as Shostakovich -- I'm thinking particularly of the 14th Symphony (1969) and the 14th and 15th String Quartets (1973 and 1974) -- is Britten, notably in his last opera, Death in Venice (completed in 1973) Third String Quartet (1975, clearly influenced by Shostakovich's final quartets; the two composers had enormous mutual admiration). And I've merely skimmed off a few highlights here, not even mentioning, for example, the two great operas.

Was Shostakovich's world view shaped by the times and society he lived in? Of course. Is that a crucial part of his music? Obviously, and how could there not be interest in hearing a great musical artist's response to all of that? So far it's given me a lifetime's worth of absorption, not to mention the pleasure of a large quantity of beautiful and gripping music.


QUICK HITS: SOME SHOSTAKOVICH CDs (AND DVDs)

For the Shostakovich string quartets, the St. Petersburg Quartet'sboldly reimagined Hyperion cycle is one of the great recorded achievements of the last couple of decades, while the Shostakovich Quartet'smore traditionally conceived but bursting-with-life Melodiya cycle is altogether recommendable. It's a shame that Chandos's well-merited and well-intentioned reissue of the first Borodin Quartetrecordings (before first violinist Rostislav Dubinsky left the quartet and the Soviet Union) of the first 13 quartets doesn't really do justice to the richness and variet of sound of the ensemble as heard on LP, but in their basic commitment these performances remain unsurpasssed.

Rather than get enmeshed in recommendations for the Seventh and Eighth Symphonies, since the pieces do seem to me to have been connected in the composer's mind, let me just suggest the conductor who seems to me to have had the greatest degree of success with both, Neeme Järvi, with the Scottish National Orchestra on Chandos (No. 7and No. 8).And I'm going to suggest Järvi again, this time with the Göteborg Symphony, for the 13th and 14th Symphonies, on the strength of DG's handy two-CD set, which throws in the 15th as well. (I confess, though, that I still don't get the 15th Symphony.)

Leonard Bernstein's affectionate New York Philharmonic recording of the little Ninth Symphony now comes coupledwith a solid performance of what has generally been Shostakovich's most popular symphony and probably most popular work, the Fifth Symphony. You can see as well as hear Lenny's later Ninth, with the Vienna Philharmonic, on a DG DVDcoupled with the Shostakovich Sixth Symphony.

Tatiana Nikolayeva made three audio recordings (that I know of) of the enormous Op. 87 set of 24 Preludes and Fugues for solo piano. But Medici Arts' video recordingseems an obvious recommendation, and a great bargain. (Amazon is selling it for $20, and other merchants offer it for even less.)


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Sunday Classics: A sneak peek into the sound world of Benjamin Britten

At the heart of Britten's haunting opera Peter Grimes are the four Sea Interludes, orchestrally evoking life in a poor Suffolk-coast fishing village. The first, "Dawn," which joins the Prologue and Act I, is played here by the Boston Symphony in Leonard Bernstein's "Final Concert."

by Ken

Way back when (in August 2007, actually), writing briefly about some music of Igor Stravinsky, I caused a flutter of sorts when I described him as "one of the last three great composers":

I really want to talk about Stravinsky one of these days, and I plan to get to it really soon. Awhile back I startled Howie by saying that we've already had the last three great composers we're ever going to have--Stravinsky (1882-1971), Dmitri Shostakovich (1906-1975), and Benjamin Britten (1913-1976), all now long since safely dead and buried. This seems so obvious to me now that I forget how stark it may sound to others. But these are the last composers who seem to me, through the sheer force of their imagination, to have transcended the exhaustion of the musical language they inherited, or could scrounge up or invent.

The proposition still seems to me so simple and uncontroversial that I wonder at the fuss. What bothers me is my failure to deliver on the implied promise there. Since then we have bumped up against Shostakovich but not said much of what I hoped to say about these three composers. And I'm afraid today we aren't going to do a lot more than bump up against Britten. Still, we have to start somewhere.

One problem is that I still haven't figured out how to get control of musical samples. My position is that there's no point in my blithering on if you can't hear the music, which is the important part. As a matter of fact, I've had a Britten piece on the drawing board for two years now, which was to kick off with the first of the Sea Interludes, "Dawn," from the composer's most-performed opera, Peter Grimes, ideally picking up from the Ellen-Grimes duet at the end of the Prologue and continuing into the awakening-village opening of Act I, and then what is for me the emotional core of Britten's War Requiem.


The War Requiem, written for the dedication of the rebuilt Coventry Cathedral (destroyed by German bombs in 1940) in 1962, interspersed poems by the antiwar poet Wilfred Owen (1893-1918), who died in military action a week before the signing of the armistice that ended World War I (his parents are said to have received notification the day the armistice was announced), with the traditional Latin Requiem text. The excerpt I was aiming for was Britten's setting, as part of the Offertorium of the Requiem, of Owen's "Parable of the Old Man and the Young," a retelling of the story of Abram and Isaac, by the tenor and baritone soloists, that veers off track at the end, culminating in one of the more harrowing images I know -- "the old man" Abram slaying not just his son Isaac but "half the seed of Europe, one by one."

THE PARABLE OF THE OLD MAN AND THE YOUNG

So Abram rose, and clave the wood, and went,
And took the fire with him, and a knife.
And as they sojourned, both of them together,
Isaac the first-born spake, and said, My Father,
Behold the preparations, fire and iron,
But where the lamb for this burnt-offering?
Then Abram bound the youth with belts and straps,
And builded parapets the trenches there,
And stretched forth the knife to slay his son.
When lo! an angel called him out of heaven,
Saying, Lay not thy hand upon the lad,
Neither do anything to him. Behold,
A ram, caught in a thicket by its horns;
Offer the Ram of Pride instead of him.
But the old man would not so, but slew his son,
And half the seed of Europe, one by one.

-- Wilfred Owen

Back in 2007 the Britten pickings on YouTube were mighty slender, and I scratched at how to produce my own audio clips, at least, in the process tantalizing Howie with the War Requiem excerpt, for which I couldn't actually find a recording that satisfies me. I'm still not wildly happy with the Bernstein "Final Concert" performance of the "Dawn" Peter Grimes interlude, which seems to me to seriously underplay the whole piece -- and underplaying is something Lenny was rarely accused of. (He had made a better recording of the Grimes interludes with the New York Philharmonic.

Still, the performance is good enough to allow the listener access to the interplay of unexpected tone colors, harmonies, and rhythms with which Britten conjures this musical image of dawn in a fishing village on his beloved Suffolk coast. Like all the Sea Interludes, this is music that's meant to play straight into the imagination, and I've found that even after long acquaintance it becomes more haunting with each hearing.

Strangely, the War Requiem has become one of Britten's more played compositions, and there is now a fair amount of it on YouTube, but I haven't turned up the Offertorium at all, let alone in an acceptable performance. I say it's "strange" that the Requiem is now played so widely, because it has always struck me as one of Britten's less accessible works, except at the most obvious level -- the interplay of the Owen poems and the liturgical text, and their symbolic connection to the occasion for which the piece was written.

(Note to Howie: We'll come back to the War Requiem. I promise. Eventually.)

I have made one happy discovery on YouTube: a lovely performance of Britten's 1942-43 Serenade for Tenor, Horn, and Strings, Op. 31, a setting for this unusual group of performers (inspired by the availability of Britten's life partner, the tenor Peter Pears, and the brilliant young horn player Dennis Brain) of six quite diverse poems, with a Prologue and Epilogue. It's broken into three clips; this middle one encompasses the second, third, and fourth songs, the "Nocturne" (Tennyson's "The Splendor Falls on Castle Walls" from The Princess), "Elegy" (Blake's "The Sick Rose," aka "O Rose, thou art sick," and "Dirge" (the anonymous 15th-century "Lyke-Wake Dirge"):


The "Nocturne," "Elegy," and "Dirge," the second through fourth songs from Britten's Serenade, are performed by tenor John Mark Ainsley, horn soloist Danilo Stagni, and the strings of La Scala's Orchestra filarmonica conducted by Jeffrey Tate. (Part 1 of the Serenade is here; part 3, here.)

Nocturne

The splendor falls on castle walls
And snowy summits old in story;
The long light shakes across the lakes,
And the wild cataract leaps in glory.
Blow, bugle, blow, set the wild echoes flying,
Blow, bugle; answer, echoes, dying, dying, dying.

O, hark, O, hear! how thin and clear,
And thinner, clearer, farther going!
O, sweet and far from cliff and scar
The horns of Elfland faintly blowing!
Blow, let us hear the purple glens replying,
Blow, bugles; answer, echoes, dying, dying, dying.

O love, they die in yon rich sky,
They faint on hill or field or river;
Our echoes roll from soul to soul,
And grow forever and forever.
Blow, bugle, blow, set the wild echoes flying,
And answer, echoes, answer, dying, dying, dying.

-- Alfred Lord Tennyson

Elegy [at 1:23]

O Rose, thou art sick!
The invisible worm
That flies in the night,
In the howling storm,

Has found out thy bed
Of crimson joy:
And his dark secret love
Does thy life destroy.

-- William Blake

Dirge [no clear separation point from the orchestral postlude following "Elegy," but the "Dirge" vocal begins at 6:02]

This ae nighte, this ae nighte,
REFRAIN:—- Every nighte and alle,
Fire and fleet and candle-lighte,
And Christe receive thy saule.

When thou from hence away art past,
-— Every nighte and alle,
To Whinny-muir thou com'st at last;
And Christe receive thy saule.

If ever thou gavest hosen and shoon,
-— Every nighte and alle,
Sit thee down and put them on;
And Christe receive thy saule.

If hosen and shoon thou ne'er gav'st nane
-— Every nighte and alle,
The whinnes sall prick thee to the bare bane;
And Christe receive thy saule.

From Whinny-muir when thou may'st pass,
-- Every nighte and alle,
To Brig o' Dread thou com'st at last;
And Christe receive thy saule.

From Brig o' Dread when thou may'st pass,
—- Every nighte and alle,
To Purgatory fire thou com'st at last;
And Christe receive thy saule.

If ever thou gavest meat or drink,
-— Every nighte and alle,
The fire sall never make thee shrink;
And Christe receive thy saule.

If meat or drink thou ne'er gav'st nane,
—- Every nighte and alle,
The fire will burn thee to the bare bane;
And Christe receive thy saule.

This ae nighte, this ae nighte,
-— Every nighte and alle,
Fire and fleet and candle-lighte,
And Christe receive thy saule.

-- anonymous

I'm not going to say much of anything about the music. Again, I would simply encourage: (a) alertness to the musical setting as well as the texts, and (b) receptivity to both. I think initially you'll find some moments that grab you immediately, and then with repetition other points will begin to act on you, and gradually all will deepen.

Obviously Jon Mark Ainsley is a very different sort of tenor from Peter Pears, and it's kind of a jolt to me, in the "Dirge" (the song I was actually shooting for here) not to hear the truly dirge-appropriate wailing sound Pears produces his upper range. But it's really only when we hear inspired performers quite different from Britten and his circle that we begin to appreciate the true stature of this music. Jeffrey Tate is the good kind of English sensibilty for Britten (I'll come back to this question of nationality briefly), and is well suited to helping the Italian musicians hear this music.

The most obvious case is that of Peter Grimes itself. When Jon Vickers, a singer who could hardly have been more different in voice and personality from Pears, undertook the title role at the Met in 1967, with the collaboration of director Tyrone Guthrie and conductor Colin Davis, a whole previously unheard dimension of the piece opened up. An instructive lesson in the dangerous provincialization of Britten can be learned from what happend when Vickers and Davis took the show back to England. By the time of the Covent Garden video and audio recordings, most of the dimensionality of the Met performances had been flattened to two dimensions, most noticeably in Davis's blandly conventional conducting (it feels like there's an extra hour or two of mediocre music stuffed into the opera), but unfortunately also in Vickers' more mannered, manicured performance.

There was always tension in the relationship between Britten and his countrymen. The composer was unquestionably "English" and "British" to the core, but not in the accepted conventional ways, and they knew it and resented it, especially in the loftier social circles. Was it because he was gay? Yes. Was it because he was a pacifist (he sought and received conscientious objector status during World War II, declaring himself unable to kill or to participate in killing)? Yes. But I think those were symptoms of Britten's "otherness." The more powerfully Britten's musical supremacy emerged, the more you can see the British musical establishment trying to prop up lesser alternatives who might be passed off as Britian's really and truly greatest composer.

Why, it was almost as if Britten was, gasp, pointing a finger of accusation, perhaps rejection, or even ridicule, at all the institutions Britons held sacred! Um, yeah, kinda, d'ya think? Nah, couldn't be.


QUICK HITS

Four Sea Interludes from "Peter Grimes"

If you can't find Britten's own recording of the Sea Interludes from Peter Grimes, try Andrew Davis's,coupled with the composer's ever-popular Young Person's Guide to the Orchestra.

Leonard Bernstein's NY Phil Sea Interludes are available in, of all things, SACD-only format,interestingly coupled with the LB-NYP Holst Planets.

Serenade for Tenor, Horn, and Strings

Peter Pears, Dennis Brain, and the composer recorded the Serenade as early as 1944, with the Boyd Neel Orchestra, and that version has turned up on a Pearl CD, "Benjamin Britten performs Benjamin Britten,"as well as in a valuable four-CD collection of historic Britten recordings -- some conducted by the composer, most not -- in Membran International's Quadromania series. (I paid some ridiculous price like $8 for it at Berkshire Record Outlet, but they don't seem to have it anymore. CD Universe lists it -- at $15.59 for the four-disc set -- but reports it "backordered since 7/28/2009.")

For most listeners, the recording of choice is the gorgeous the gorgeous stereo versionwith Barry Tuckwell filling the gap left by Brain's death in 1957 at the preposterous age of 36. It's coupled with Pears-Britten stereo recordings of the Rimbaud song cycle Les Illuminations (originally written for soprano) and the sequel to the Serenade, the 1958 Nocturne for tenor, assorted instruements, and strings.

War Requiem

There's certainly room for an alternative to the composer's own recording,with the originally scheduled soloists, Galina Vishnevsakaya, Peter Pears, and Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau. But as the recordings continue to pile up, I can't say I've found one that's especially persuasive, or that offers worthy alternatives to Britten's idiosyncratic trio of soloists.


SUNDAY CLASSICS POSTS

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