GREAT BRITTEN
Composer celebrated on 100th anniversary of his birth,
British composer Benjamin Britten, a pacifist who spent some of the Second World War in Canada, would have turned 100 this year on Nov. 22.
Although he died relatively young, at 63, his prodigious talent has supplied operas, concertos, choral, solo vocal and chamber music that are being played around the world this year in celebration of his centenary.
It’s time this legendary genius got his due, say the artists who know his work.
“He’s worthwhile to celebrate. He’s the real deal,” says Canadian composer Brian Current, a Guggenheim Fellow and winner of the CBC National Competition for Young Composers.
“He has clarity of ideas and a vivid imagination.”
“He gets under your skin,” says Johannes Debus, who will conduct the Canadian Opera Company’s production of Britten’s Peter Grimes, opening Saturday at the Four Seasons Centre for the Performing Arts.
“There’s always a great dramatic concept.”
Peter Grimes is the story of a lonely fisherman surrounded by hostile villagers who blame him for a young apprentice’s death.
(The outsider and loss of innocence are common themes in Britten’s work.)
Since the boy in the opera doesn’t speak, the instruments must speak on his behalf.
“The orchestra shows his fear,” says Debus. “Benjamin Britten was a master of instrumentation.”
Peter Grimes, written in 1945, was the first big hit for Britten who was born in Suffolk, England, and educated at the Royal College of Music in London. He loved the countryside and settled with his partner, tenor Peter Pears, in his beloved Aldeburgh, a coastal town in Suffolk. Together they founded a festival in1948 that continues to this day.
Peter Oundjian, music director of the Toronto Symphony Orchestra, which is showcasing five Britten compositions in 11 concerts this season, met Britten as a schoolboy in England.
The 10-year-old Oundjian belonged to a choir that Britten used on a recording and he has clear memories of meeting the great man (which he shares in a YouTube video about the Britten programming).
When the students realized the most famous living conductor in England was coming to their school, “we were beside ourselves,” says Oundjian. The students sang, and Britten conducted, for an hour.
Although Britten was a masterful composer, he was also a good conductor, says Oundjian, who was inspired by Britten to pick up the ba- ton. As a conductor, Britten “was able to motivate,” a technique Oundjian says he has adopted.
He calls Britten “one of the four or five most important composers of the 20th century.”
Stephen Ralls went to work for Britten’s Aldeburgh Festival in 1972 in the waning years of Britten’s life, which was cut short by heart disease. This was a wonderful opportunity for a young musician just starting out, says Ralls, who accompanied on piano the performers practising Britten’s last operatic work, Death in Venice.
“He pushed himself so hard,” Ralls says of Britten. After his big success with Grimes, “he wrote six operas in the next decade,” for a total of 17 operas by the time of his death.
For a decade, Ralls was musical director of the University of Toronto’s opera division and was co-artistic director of the Aldeburgh Connection concert series in Canada.
As someone who knew Britten well, Ralls describes him “as someone very English. He had a lot of friends, but he was reserved. Music was the centre of his life.
“He was not a curmudgeon, he was a perfectionist. What he most detested was sloppiness.”
He also wrote a lot of music for young performers, including a children’s chorus called Noah’s Flood, which had the children playing the animals boarding the ark. Conductor Stéphane Denève will be on the TSO podium Oct. 10 and 12 to lead the orchestra in Britten’s Violin Concerto. He says there is a distinct “Britten sound.” “He doesn’t put a lot of decorations to hold the resonance.” The music is very precise and fast, says Denève. “You have to be very alert. He writes very clearly, wellorganized. He has confidence. When you look at the score, it is very beautiful visually.” Britten frequently wrote music promoting peace, including “War Requiem,” says Denève. Program notes for the concert say the early stages of the “Requiem” were written while Britten was in Canada in1939 at the outbreak of the Second World War. Violinist James Ehnes says that, while Britten remains popular in England, he has only recently been getting the attention he deserves in North America. The birthday celebrations have sparked a proliferation of Britten concerts; Ehnes has played at more than a dozen in the past 12 months.
“He has a profound emotional message that is hard to put your finger on,” says Ehnes, who is playing the “Violin Concerto.”
Modern audiences are getting used to Britten and compositions “that have fallen through the cracks” are now seeing the light of day, Ehnes says.
One of the Britten’s techniques was to juxtapose unusual instruments, says Ehnes, citing the example of a tuba paired with two piccolos.
“The piccolos were twittering up high, where only dogs can hear and the tuba was a sub woofer. It was spooky and fantastic.”
On Oct. 31, Nov. 1 and 2, Oundjian has paired the bombastic Carmina Burana with Britten’s Serenade for Tenor, Horn and Strings: English poems set to music and sung by tenor Nicholas Phan.
“There is a clear emotional, visceral character to his work. He has the highest level of technical mastery,” says Phan.
Using the poems of John Keats and Alfred Tennyson, Britten “takes the listener from moonrise to sunrise,” Phan says. But Phan doesn’t want the praise of musical experts to scare people away from Britten.
“It’s not out of reach at all. He is a masterful storyteller.”