7/24/2023 0 Comments Les illuminationsHe will perform with both companies in 2005 as well as at the Wigmore Hall with the Scottish Ensemble. Toby Spence has established strong links with both English National Opera and the Paris Opera. Toby Spence is a world-class tenor renowned for his operatic roles as well as on the concert platform. The group's film work includes the 1999 release Orphans and the award-winning film and album of Follow the Moonstone. The group undertakes varied radio and television broadcasts, and makes regular live recordings for BBC Radio 3. The Scottish Ensemble is a dynamic group of 12 string players with outstanding violinist Clio Gould as Artistic Director. He wrote the Serenade for Tenor, Horn & Strings in 1943. He later returned to the UK and, partly stimulated by Purcell, started to concentrate on English verse. Britten moved to the USA in 1939 with Peter Pears where he wrote Les Illuminations. The Variations on a Theme of Frank Bridge is an early work with a high personal definition. 31 (1:48)īenjamin Britten studied with Frank Bridge as a boy. 8- Epilogue - Serenade for Tenor, Horn and Strings, Op. 7- Sonnet - Serenade for Tenor, Horn and Strings, Op. 6- Hymn - Serenade for Tenor, Horn and Strings, Op. 5- Dirge - Serenade for Tenor, Horn and Strings, Op. 4- Elegy - Serenade for Tenor, Horn and Strings, Op. 3- Nocturne - Serenade for Tenor, Horn and Strings, Op. 2- Pastorale - Serenade for Tenor, Horn and Strings, Op. 1- Prologue - Serenade for Tenor, Horn and Strings, Op. 1- Introduction and Theme - Variations on a Theme of Franck Bridge, Op. All that's lacking in Our Hunting Fathers is a bit more theatricality in the singing of Phyllis Bryn-Julson, to give the right bite and pungency to WH Auden's savagely satirical texts.Scottish Ensemble - Clio Gould - Britten - Illuminations, Serenade, Bridge variarionsĠ1. In that work and in the wonderful Our Hunting Fathers, arguably Britten's first masterpiece, the orchestral playing under Bedford has exactly the right raw urgency. Felicity Lott is suitably delicate in the Quatre Chansons Françaises, teenage settings rediscovered after Britten's death, but just not vivid enough in the savage passions of the Rimbaud-based Les Illuminations. The third, Still Falls the Rain, a setting of an Edith Sitwell poem for tenor, horn and piano, is heard in a curious context, as part of the sequence The Heart of the Matter, which Britten devised around the work with readings (delivered by Judi Dench here) and other short songs on Sitwell texts.Īlongside those, the performances of the three orchestral song cycles with female voices seem far less convincing. The second canticle, Abraham and Isaac, is often performed nowadays with a counter-tenor singing the alto part, but the work was written for Pears and Kathleen Ferrier, and here Langridge is partnered by contralto Jean Rigby, producing a much more coherent sound when the two voices are heard together. The collection of the five canticles, with Langridge again the link between them all, is well worth investigating too. The result is a wonderful bargain, a perfect combination of early, middle-period and late Britten. His performances of the Serenade for Tenor, Horn and Strings and the Nocturne sits alongside Ann Murray's wonderfully touching account of the cantata Phaedra, which is many worlds away from the recording by Janet Baker, for whom the work was composed. But he uses those qualities to strikingly different effect. The tenor Philip Langridge, for instance, matches Pears in the clarity of his diction and the elegance and musicality of his phrasing. There is no hint here, however, that any of the performers is trying to evoke that earlier generation of singers. They are performances that preserve one strong link with the mainstream Britten tradition: their common denominator is the conductor and pianist Steuart Bedford, who worked regularly with the composer and conducted many of the late works when Britten became too ill to do it. they have been bought up by Naxos and reissued in its English song series. These three discs first appeared on Collins Classics in the mid-1990s following that label's demise. Yet any composer's output has to be regularly renewed by succeeding generations of interpreters, and while that renewal has taken rather longer with some of Britten's works than perhaps it should have done, this clutch of discs from Naxos is a reminder of one starting point for the songs at least.
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