Barbican Britten: The Sixteen, 22 Nov

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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 4
contradicted by complex fugal counterpoint. The final movement is extended and lyrical, pushing beyond the seeming restrictions of another opening ostinato and giving way to instinctive, joyous solos and a final choral flourish. Auden’s professional influence on Britten was as brief as it was intense, but provoked some of the composer’s most creative musical responses. A Shepherd’s Carol (1944) is another example – an extraordinary, inscrutable piece, and one of the only remaining clues to a major work that might have been. While based in America during the war, Auden started work on the text of his Christmas Oratorio, intending that Britten should set it. In the end though, only two extracts made it into music, including this Shepherd’s Carol. Advised by Auden that it should be treated either as ‘jazz or folk-song’, Britten chose the latter. A traditional structure of solo verses and refrain however becomes something rather unexpected. The music of each unaccompanied verse finds a different melodic way to arrive back at the chorus, reframing and casting doubt on its sugary certainty (the affectation of ‘O lift your little pinkie’ is echoed in Britten’s cloying, quasi-folk harmonies and smug Lombardic rhythms). Auden’s poetry is associative and bizarre, provoking contrasting responses from each of the four soloists that range from codopera (tenor) to a forthright, popular-style song from the alto. Withdrawing the piece after its first performance, perhaps Britten himself felt uneasy over his strange stylistic collage, that nevertheless offers a characteristically original take on the Christmas carol. Treble voices have a particular significance for a composer who always wished himself back at the age of 13. Innocence remains tantalisingly out of reach in the operas – corrupted in The Turn of the Screw, untouchable in Death in Venice, tragically betrayed in Billy Budd – but enjoys a much less complicated relationship with Britten’s choral writing. Friday Afternoons (from which A New Year Carol comes) is a cycle of unison songs for upper voices originally composed for Britten’s schoolmaster brother and his school choir. Although nothing could be simpler than the melodies, Britten manages to insert his distinctive musical voice into piano accompaniments that subvert as often as they support. Here, in a carol based on the pagan New Year custom for children to sprinkle passers-by with water from a well, Britten sets the lilting melodic explorations of his voices against anchoring chords in piano (or harp), giving the whole a folk-innocence and a true simplicity that couldn’t be further from the muted cynicism of the Shepherd’s Carol. The Choral Dances from Britten’s Elizabeth I opera Gloriana were adapted by the composer himself from a sequence in Act 2 in which the townsfolk of Norwich present a masque for the visiting queen. The six Dances (scored for choir, harp and a solo tenor who serves as master of ceremonies) are poised somewhere between satire and sincerity, pastiche and pomp. They capture both the performers’ rustic attempts at sophistication (the use purely of consonant intervals in the Second Dance, depicting ‘Concord’, feels comically literal) and their energetic charm (the lively syncopation of the Fifth Dance or the forthright bell-chime patterning of the First Dance). The set concludes, however, with a movement that transcends goodhumoured mockery to deliver a radiant prayer of praise. No-one imbues C major with more warmth than Britten, and as the canonic waves of entries ripple over one another in endless cycles, we find ourselves no longer in England but suddenly in the Albion of poets’ imagination. Composed as a silver wedding present for Leonard and Dorothy Elmhirst (friends and – crucially – benefactors of Britten’s), the Five Flower Songs are among the most conservative of all the composer’s choral cycles. That isn’t to say they lack interest or invention, simply that the iconoclasm of A Boy Was Born or Christ’s Nativity has no place here. While many of Britten’s earlier choral works look determinedly to a musical future, this set from 1950 feels like a gentle homage to an earlier age, to the pastoral cycles of Stanford and Parry. It’s an effect only heightened by the choice of poets – Herrick, Crabbe, Clare and an anonymous balladeer. We start briskly, with any undue sentimentality over Herrick’s fading daffodils dulled by Britten’s matter-of-fact treatment – voices dancing together in imitative counterpoint that feels anything but mournful. But both Herrick’s ‘The Succession of the Four Sweet Months’ and John Clare’s ‘The Evening Primrose’ indulge their 5 Programme notes
Page 1 and 2: 1 Barbican Britten: The Sixteen Fri
Page 3: Welcome to Barbican Britten At the
Page 7 and 8: Texts Hymn to the Virgin Alexandra
Page 9 and 10: Five Flower Songs 1 To Daffodils Fa
Page 11 and 12: With that beheard a little tiny pag
Page 13 and 14: Wimmen waxeth wounder proude, So we
Page 15 and 16: Marco Borggreve About the performer

Barbican Britten: The Sixteen, 22 Nov

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