Barbican Britten: The Sixteen, 22 Nov

Benjamin Britten at 100
Benjamin Britten was born on 22 November
– feast day of St Cecilia, patron saint of music
– making it hard not to see his career as fated,
somehow meant to be. It’s a sensation that
only grows when you think of the precocious
young Britten producing his first ‘compositions’
at just 5 years old in a house that didn’t
even contain a gramophone, displaying an
instinctive talent only partially explained by the
enthusiasm of his amateur-musician mother.
Tonight’s concert marks Britten’s 100th birthday
with a programme of the composer’s works
for choir. Although he is arguably best-known
for his operas, it is in the choral writing that we
find the real musical constant, the touchstone,
of his career. Spanning 45 years, tonight’s
programme is bookended by the Hymn to the
Virgin (written when Britten was just 16) and
Sacred and Profane (dating from the year
before his death), tracing the development
of a composer from his earliest explorations
to musical maturity and sophistication.
Confined to his boarding-school sanatorium by
illness, the teenage Britten wrote the carol that
would become one of his best-loved pieces –
the exquisite Hymn to the Virgin. It carries great
significance on slight musical shoulders – having
gained the composer entry to the Royal College
of Music – and would eventually be one of only
two pieces performed at his own funeral. It was
also the first of four such hymns that Britten would
produce, each dedicated to a different saint.
The Hymn to the Virgin is a perfect miniature,
setting an anonymous medieval text with a
delicacy occasionally overshadowed in Britten’s
later works by complexity. The composer
divides his eight voices into two SATB choirs.
While one remains grounded in the earthly
by its English text, and in the human by its
emotional crescendos and climaxes, the other
is set at a distance. Singing only in Latin, these
other-worldly voices echo and transmute the
utterances of the first choir into music that’s
unchanging, eternal. In Britten’s hands a
simple, strophic hymn is itself transfigured.
If the skill of the Hymn to the Virgin lies in its
restraint, then the Hymn to St Cecilia is entirely
the opposite. Emerging from the same flurry
of creativity as A Ceremony of Carols (and
at least partially composed on the same sea
voyage home from America in 1942), the
work is the product of a new optimism, a reembracing
of national identity and professional
purpose that characterised Britten’s return
from self-imposed exile. Publicly attacked for
the pacifist convictions that drove him from
England during the war, Britten now faced
up to his critics, setting English texts again
in that most English of genres, the choral
anthem, for the first time since his departure.
And which poet could he choose but
W H Auden? Auden’s verse had already
proved a match and spur to Britten’s musical
skill, and would here drive him even further. An
ode in praise of the patron saint of music, the
poem is divided into three sections which form
three short movements for unaccompanied
SSATB choir. The first takes its cue from Purcell,
constructing the flowing, modal lines of the
sopranos and altos over a sort of ground bass
in the lower voices. The refrain, a variation of
which divides each movement, derives from
the music of this opening. The central section,
‘I cannot grow’, is a breathless scherzo, the
scalic innocence and simplicity of its melody
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