Britten: Violin Concerto / Cello Symphony

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Benjamin Britten(1913-1976) Violin Concerto; CelloSymphonyWhat's in a name? Isit just piquant coincidence that one of Britain's greatest composers was called- Britten? Benjamin Britten's beloved mother certainly saw significance in hermarried surname: extolling the 'three Bs' - Bach, Beethoven and Brahms - shewas 'determined' the fourth would be Britten. Benjamin was her fourth child,born, auspiciously, on November 22nd - St Cecilia's Day, feast day of thepatron saint of music.The future composer'schildhood home faced the North Sea in Lowestoft, the most easterly town inBritain. Britten loved his native Suffolk, feeling 'firmly rooted in thisglorious county'; he could have added the words of fisherman Peter Grimes inhis most famous opera '...by familiar fields, marsh and sand, ordinary streets,prevailing wind'. What drew Britten and his lover and muse, the tenor PeterPears, back from their new life in America in the early 1940s? Britten'srediscovery of the Suffolk poet George Crabbe, whose The Borough inspiredPeter Grimes. Where did Britten and Pears settle? That very 'Borough',Aldeburgh, another Suffolk coastal town which, thanks to Britten, has been homesince 1948 to one of Britain's finest music festivals. He found 'workingbecomes more and more difficult away from that home'.A quintessentiallyEnglish, provincial composer, then? Far from it. After Britten's death TheTimes acclaimed him 'the first British composer to capture and hold theattention of musicians and their audiences the world over'. Britten's technicalbrilliance and openness to continental trends distinguished him from the start.In the 1920s the precocious 13-year-old - pianist, viola-player and alreadyprolific composer (shades of Mozart) - was fortunate to find a compositionteacher in Frank Bridge, virtually the only British composer with a sympathyfor the central European avant-garde of Schoenberg, Berg and Bartok, orneo-classical Stravinsky. To those models Britten added Mahler and Shostakovich. Nowonder the conservative Royal College of Music, which he attended from 1930,suffered culture shock, especially when Britten proposed to use a travel grantto study with Berg. (He didn't).The mainstay of Britten's international appeal is the stream of operaticmasterpieces initiated by Peter Grimes in 1945; but they, and his otherPears-inspired vocal music, mask further important creative strands: pieces foryoung people and instrumental music. True, for a decade in mid-career Brittenwrote practically nothing substantial without voices; but before Grimes hischamber and orchestral compositions outnumbered vocal works two to one; andafter 1960 musical friendships revitalised that interest. This recordingcouples products of both 'instrumental' periods - kindred pieces, sharingBritten's conviction that each (when he wrote it) was his finest, and roots inhis rapport with particular soloists.The Spanish violinist Antonio Brosa met Britten through Frank Bridge inthe early thirties; following the S