Release Date: 12 January 1999
Label: Naxos - Nxc / Naxos Classics
Packaging Type: Jewel Case
No of Units: 1
Barcode: 636943436028
Genres: Classical
Composer/Series: BRITTEN
Description
Benjamin Britten(1913-1976) String Quartets Vol. 2What's in a name? Is it just piquant coincidence that one of Britain'sgreatest composers was called - Britten? Benjamin Britten's beloved mothercertainly saw significance in her married surname: extolling the 'three Bs' -Bach, Beethoven and Brahms - she was 'determined' the fourth would be Britten.Benjamin was her fourth child, born, auspiciously, on November 22nd: StCecilia's Day, feast day of the patron saint of music.The future composer's childhood home faced the North Sea in Lowestoft,the most easterly town in Britain. Britten loved his native Suffolk, feeling'firmly rooted in this glorious county'; he could have added the words offisherman Peter Grimes in his most famous opera '...by familiar fields, marshand sand, ordinary streets, prevailing wind'. What drew Britten and his loverand muse, the tenor Peter Pears, back from their new life in America in theearly 1940s? Britten's rediscovery of the Suffolk poet George Crabbe, whose TheBorough inspired Peter Grimes. Where did Britten and Pearssettle? That very 'Borough', Aldeburgh, another Suffolk coastal town which,thanks to Britten, has been home since 1948 to one of Britain's finest musicfestivals. He found 'working becomes more and more difficult away from thathome'.A quintessentially English, provincial composer, then? Far from it.After Britten's death The Times acclaimed him 'the first Britishcomposer to capture and hold the attention of musicians and their audiences theworld over'. Britten's technical brilliance and openness to continental trendsdistinguished him from the start. In the 1920s the precocious 13-year-old -pianist, viola-player and already prolific composer (shades of Mozart) - wasfortunate to find a composition teacher in Frank Bridge, virtually the onlyBritish composer with a sympathy for the central European avant-garde ofSchoenberg, Berg and Bartok, or neo-classical Stravinsky. To those modelsBritten added Mahler and Shostakovich. No wonder the conservative Royal Collegeof Music, which he attended from 1930, suffered culture shock, especially whenBritten proposed to use a travel grant to 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 (thestring quartet playing a central role); and after 1960 musical friendships -above all with the cellist Rostropovich - revitalised that interest.Indeed, the string quartets on this CD span fifty years. The ThirdQuartet (1975) was Britten's last major work, premi?¿red after his death,while the Simple Symphony includes tunes he wrote in 1923 - aged nine!As he turned twenty,
Tracklisting
Dariia Lytvishko
Baltimore Symphony Orchestra; Marin Alsop
Alice Di Piazza; Basel Sinfonietta; NDR Bigband; Titus Engel
Anna Alas i Jove; Miquel Villalba
David Childs; Black Dyke Band; Nicholas Childs
Various
Various
Lully
