John Bridcut, author of the acclaimed 'Britten's Children', has included significant fresh material which will make the book indispensable for Britten aficionados as well as for those who are discovering the composer's music for the first time. This guide is all about finding a way into Britten's music. An outline of planned chapters: - The Top Ten Britten pieces - Critics' First Impressions - Britten's Life - Britten and Pears - The things they said - The Music (stage works, choral works, songs, chamber music, orchestral works) - The Interpreters of Britten's work - Britten as Performer - The Impresario (English Opera Group and Aldeburgh Festival) - Britten's Homes - Trivial Pursuits
Britten's Children confronts the edgy subject of the composer's obsessional yet strangely innocent relationships with adolescent boys. One of the hallmarks of Benjamin Britten's music is his use of boys' voices, and John Bridcut uses this to create a fresh prism through which to view the composer's life. Interweaving discussion of the music he wrote for and about children with interviews with the boys whom Britten befriended, Bridcut explores the influence of these unique friendships - notably with the late David Hemmings - and how they helped Britten maintain links with his own happy childhood. In a remarkable part of the book Bridcut tells for the first time the full story of Britten's love affair in the 1930s with the 18-year-old German Wulff Scherchen, son of the conductor Hermann Scherchen. As Paul Hoggart of The Times commented, 'this type of love belonged to an emotional landscape that has vanished for ever, and we are the poorer for it'. Since making the film, the author has extended his research to include friendships Britten had with children which have not previously been documented.The documentary Britten's Children won the Royal Philharmonic Society's 2005 Award for Creative Communication: 'this serious and beautiful film explored one aspect of a composer's life in great depth. Avoiding the temptation of sensationalism, Britten's Children was imaginatively researched and both touching and revelatory'.
An insightful, provocative selection of the best opera performances, chosen by The New York Times's chief classical music critic in one hundred original essays Opera intertwines the drama of the theater with the powerful emotionality of music. In this magical and illuminating guide to the best opera recordings, Anthony Tommasini delves into the ways story and music interweave to create the subtle but telling moments that move us. Tommasini brings to life the rich history of opera performance and the singers and conductors who, over the past century, have come to own the music. He chooses masterworks, such as Arturo Toscanini's La Boheme, captured for posterity fifty years after he conducted the opera's 1896 premiere for Puccini, and Leontyne Price's Leonora in Il Trovatore, an encapsulation of the ideal Verdi soprano. For aficionados and newcomers alike, Tommasini is the perfect guide to the passions and playfulness of the opera.
In this classic study of Benjamin Britten and Michael Tippett, Arnold Whittall builds up a unique double portrait of the two leading composers of their generation. For this second, revised edition Whittall includes a new chapter on Tippett's major works of the 1980s: the Piano Sonata No. 4, the large-scale choral composition The Mask of Time and the most recent opera, New Year. In addition, new information on the Britten repertoire and an updated bibliography are also presented.
A thick and informative guide to the world of classical music and its stunning recordings, complete with images from CD cases, concert halls, and of the musicians themselves.
Ideas in Profile Series Is music a science or an art? It's both, as Andrew Gant reveals in this lively and accessible account of what music is and what it's for. Music has been central to life since the dawn of humankind and is intimately bound up with the origins of language. Andrew Gant introduces us to its long history and its many genres and manifestations. He explains how composers compose, players play and singers sing. He looks at how musical styles develop, the ways they fall in and out of fashion, and why certain kinds of music - dancing and love songs, for example - is a universal in human culture. He considers how music is composed, the nature of genius and the workings of inspiration. He shows how music can be composed and used to stir patriotism, instill courage, reinforce identity, sell a product, or make a political point. And he goes beyond humans to examine music in the natural world in the creativity of birdsong. This is, in short, the ideal introduction to a very big subject.
Traces scholarly thought from the nineteenth-century birth of evolutionary biology to the mapping of the human genome through forty-eight essays, arranged in chronological order, each preceded by a one-page essay that explains the significance of the chosen work.
Kozinn's essays on the most dazzling recordings available provide both practical guidance for building a library and insight into the transcendent power of classical music."--BOOK JACKET.
Since Britten's death in 1976, numerous articles and books have been written about his life and work. Much has been made of the strong influences of his pacifism and his homosexuality. It is often suggested that Britten felt himself to be an outsider from 'normal' society, and that this accounts for the his concern to portray the 'outsider' in his operas. There is no doubt that this is an important aspect of Britten's art, but the present work attempts to show that his music embraces much wider and more universal concerns, and in addressing those concerns there is a clearly defined pattern of spiritual influence. Part One of the book examines Britten's early life, and the strong presence which the Church had in his childhood and adolescence. It explores the way in which certain spiritual influences were first manifested, and how, like the more specifically musical 'themes' which Donald Mitchell has noted, they can be traced throughout Britten's life and work. The author was privileged to have conversations with two clergymen who were influential in Britten's life, as well as gathering valuable insights through a long series of conversations with Sir Peter Pears. Part Two examines a wide range of the composer's music in which a spiritual dimension can be traced. The specifically liturgical music has received rather less critical notice than Britten's larger works. The music is discussed here, and shown to possess musical characteristics in common with the larger works. Britten could not be described as a conventional Christian; still less is it true to describe him, as Eric Walter White has done, as 'keen, wherever possible, to work within the framework of the Church of England'. Nevertheless, his spirituality was rooted in the religious experience of his childhood. This book seeks to demonstrate that Britten retained a sense of the Christian values absorbed in childhood and adolescence, and that these - along with the specifically Christian heritage of plainsong - were strongly influential in his choice and treatment of themes.
Examining the intersections between musical culture and a British project of reconstruction from the 1940s to the early 1960s, this study asks how gestures toward the past negotiated issues of recovery and renewal. In the wake of the Second World War, music became a privileged site for re-enchanting notions of history and community, but musical recourse to the past also raised issues of mourning and loss. How was sound figured as a historical object and as a locus of memory and magic? Wiebe addresses this question using a wide range of sources, from planning documents to journalism, public ceremonial and literature. Its central focus, however, is a set of works by Benjamin Britten that engaged both with the distant musical past and with key episodes of postwar reconstruction, including the Festival of Britain, the Coronation of Elizabeth II and the rebuilding of Coventry Cathedral.
