Benjamin Britten - Wikipedia. Britten in the mid- 1.
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Hans Wild)Edward Benjamin Britten, Baron Britten. OMCH (2. 2 November 1. December 1. 97. 6) was an English composer, conductor and pianist. He was a central figure of 2. British classical music, with a range of works including opera, other vocal music, orchestral and chamber pieces. His best- known works include the opera Peter Grimes (1. War Requiem (1. 96.
This list was created out of the need to help surround sound enthusiasts, find Multi-Channel SACD Surround Sound recordings. This list does not include information. Welcome We are delighted to announce details of the 2016/17 Kirklees Concert Season; the fourteenth year of the unique partnership between Kirklees Council and Opera. Billy Budd; Author: Herman Melville: Country: United States, England: Language: English: Genre: Adventure fiction, sea story: Published: 1924 (London: Constable & Co.).
The Young Person's Guide to the Orchestra (1. Born in Suffolk, the son of a dentist, Britten showed talent from an early age. He studied at the Royal College of Music in London and privately with the composer Frank Bridge. Britten first came to public attention with the a cappella choral work A Boy was Born in 1.
Edward Benjamin Britten, Baron Britten OM CH (22 November 1913 – 4 December 1976) was an English composer, conductor and pianist. He was a central figure of 20th.
With the premiere of Peter Grimes in 1. Over the next 2. 8 years, he wrote 1. In addition to large- scale operas for Sadler's Wells and Covent Garden, he wrote . Among the best known of these is The Turn of the Screw (1. Recurring themes in his operas include the struggle of an outsider against a hostile society and the corruption of innocence. Britten's other works range from orchestral to choral, solo vocal, chamber and instrumental as well as film music. He took a great interest in writing music for children and amateur performers, including the opera Noye's Fludde, a Missa Brevis, and the song collection Friday Afternoons.
He often composed with particular performers in mind. His most frequent and important muse was his personal and professional partner, the tenor. Peter Pears; others included Kathleen Ferrier, Jennifer Vyvyan, Janet Baker, Dennis Brain, Julian Bream, Dietrich Fischer- Dieskau and Mstislav Rostropovich. Britten was a celebrated pianist and conductor, performing many of his own works in concert and on record.
He also performed and recorded works by others, such as Bach's Brandenburg concertos, Mozart symphonies, and song cycles by Schubert and Schumann. Together with Pears and the librettist and producer Eric Crozier, Britten founded the annual Aldeburgh Festival in 1. Snape Maltings concert hall in 1. In his last year, he was the first composer to be given a life peerage. Life and career. While studying at Charing Cross Hospital in London he met Edith Hockey, the daughter of a junior Home Office official.
They were married in September 1. St John's, Smith Square, London. Britten described his family as . He made his first attempts at composition when he was five. The younger sister, Ethel, gave him piano lessons; in later life he said that he remained grateful for the excellence of her teaching.
The school had no musical tradition, and Britten continued to study the piano with Ethel Astle. From the age of ten he took viola lessons from a friend of his mother's, Audrey Alston, who had been a professional player before her marriage. When his Simple Symphony, based on these juvenilia, was recorded in 1. Britten wrote this pen- portrait of his young self for the sleeve note: Once upon a time there was a prep- school boy. He was quite an ordinary little boy .. But – there was one curious thing about this boy: he wrote music.
His friends bore with it, his enemies kicked a bit but not for long (he was quite tough), the staff couldn't object if his work and games didn't suffer. He wrote lots of it, reams and reams of it. At one of these, during the triennial Norfolk and Norwich Festival in October 1. Frank Bridge's orchestral poem The Sea, conducted by the composer. It was the first substantial piece of modern music he had ever encountered, and he was, in his own phrase, . Bridge was impressed with the boy, and after they had gone through some of Britten's compositions together he invited him to come to London to take lessons from him. Authorities differ on the extent of Bridge's influence on his pupil's technique.
Humphrey Carpenter and Michael Oliver judge that Britten's abilities as an orchestrator were essentially self- taught. At the time he felt unhappy there, even writing in his diary of contemplating suicide or running away. He won the Sullivan Prize for composition, the Cobbett Prize for chamber music, and was twice winner of the Ernest Farrar Prize for composition.
A Boy was Born, written in 1. BBC Singers, who first performed it the following year.
Together they worked on the documentary films Coal Face and Night Mail in 1. Auden was, as David Matthews puts it, . Although Britten was extraordinarily devoted to his mother and was devastated at her death, it also seems to have been something of a liberation for him. Britten's first work for him was composed within weeks of their meeting, a setting of Emily Bront. They had several reasons for leaving England, including the difficult position of pacifists in an increasingly bellicose Europe; the success that Frank Bridge had enjoyed in the US; the departure of Auden and his friend Christopher Isherwood to the US from England three months previously; hostile or belittling reviews of Britten's music in the English press; and under- rehearsed and inadequate performances.
In 1. 94. 1 Britten produced his first music drama, Paul Bunyan, an operetta, to a libretto by Auden. The two met in the summer of 1.
Mc. Phee's transcriptions for a recording. Thomson described Les Illuminations (1. Robinson surmises that Thomson was motivated by . The reputation of the work was much enhanced when Koussevitzky took it up shortly afterwards. He also knew that he must write an opera based on Crabbe's poem about the fisherman Peter Grimes.
During the long transatlantic sea crossing Britten completed the choral works A Ceremony of Carols and Hymn to St Cecilia. The latter was his last large- scale collaboration with Auden.
Britten had grown away from him, and Auden became one of the composer's so- called . He spent much of his time there in 1. Peter Grimes. Pears joined Sadler's Wells Opera Company, whose artistic director, the singer Joan Cross, announced her intention to re- open the company's home base in London with Britten's opera, casting herself and Pears in the leading roles. It was then taken on tour to provincial cities under the banner of the . The group's express purpose was to produce and commission new English operas and other works, presenting them throughout the country.
Oldham made himself useful, acting as musical assistant and arranging Variations on a Theme by Frank Bridge for full orchestra for the Frederick Ashton ballet Le R. Billy Budd (1. 95. Covent Garden premiere and was regarded by reviewers as an advance on Peter Grimes. The downbeat story of Elizabeth I in her decline, and Britten's score – reportedly thought by members of the premiere's audience . In the end nothing was done. When redundant Victorian maltings buildings in the village of Snape, six miles inland, became available for hire, Britten realised that the largest of them could be converted into a concert hall and opera house.
The 8. 30- seat Snape Maltings hall was opened by the Queen at the start of the twentieth Aldeburgh Festival on 2 June 1. The Queen again attended the opening performance in 1.
Britten conducted the first performance outside Russia of Shostakovich's Fourteenth Symphony at Snape in 1. Britten composed his cello suites, Cello Symphony and Cello Sonata for Rostropovich, who premiered them at the Aldeburgh Festival. He had been asked four years earlier to write a work for the consecration of the new Coventry Cathedral, a modernist building designed by Basil Spence. The old cathedral had been left in ruins by an air- raid on the city in 1. His text interspersed the traditional Requiem Mass with poems by Wilfred Owen.
Owen Wingrave was based, like The Turn of the Screw, on a ghost story by Henry James. This was Thomas Mann's novella Death in Venice, a subject he had been considering for some time.
He was determined to finish the opera and worked urgently to complete it before going into hospital for surgery. The replacement was successful, but he suffered a slight stroke, affecting his right hand. This brought his career as a performer to an end. The world is colder and lonelier without the presence of our supreme creator of music.“”Peter Maxwell Davies, 1.
His funeral service was held at Aldeburgh Parish Church three days later. He told Pears that he always voted either Liberal or Labour and could not imagine ever voting Conservative, but he was never a member of any party, except the Peace Pledge Union. He walked and swam regularly and kept himself as fit as he could, but Carpenter in his 1.
Britten before his final heart complaint developed. Both Mackerras and Harewood joined the list of corpses, the former for joking that the number of boys in Noye's Fludde must have been a delight to the composer, and the latter for an extramarital affair and subsequent divorce from Lady Harewood, which shocked the puritanical Britten. The latter said in 1. He did not want to hurt anyone, but the task in hand was more important than anything or anybody. He loved music, and loved youngsters caring about music. Some commentators have continued to question Britten's conduct, sometimes very sharply. Peter and St Paul's Church, Aldeburgh, Suffolk.
Cause of death. I remember receiving the full score of Fidelio for my fourteenth birthday .. But I think in a sense I never forgave them for having led me astray in my own particular thinking and natural inclinations. A letter at that time reveals his thoughts on the contemporary music scene: ? Apart from the Bergs, Stravinskys, Schoenbergs & Bridges one is a bit stumped for names, isn't one?
The same composer's Symphony of Psalms, and Petrushka were lauded in similar terms. At that time Mahler's music was little regarded and rarely played in English concert halls. Philip Brett, in Grove's article on Britten, calls it . In the large- scale category are Peter Grimes (1. Billy Budd (1. 95.
Gloriana (1. 95. 3), A Midsummer Night's Dream (1. Death in Venice (1. Of the remaining operas, The Rape of Lucretia (1.
Albert Herring (1. The Little Sweep (1.
The Turn of the Screw (1. Noye's Fludde (1. Curlew River (1. 96.