Barbican Britten: The Sixteen, 22 Nov

texts rather more, with the latter poised right
on the edge of Victoriana, even as ‘dewdrops
pearl the evening’s breast’. This is as close as
Britten ever gets to Elgar: not quite pastiche
perhaps, but certainly an affectionate echo.
Britten’s mastery, however, lies in his
juxtapositions. The ‘slimy root’ of Crabbe’s
‘Marsh Flowers’ quickly reasserts nature’s
muddier, uglier aspect, while anyone lingering
over the tranquil beauty of Clare’s primrose
finds themselves pulled up briskly by the
impetuous energy of the ‘Ballad of Green
Broom’, its witty, quasi-instrumental effects
(recalling the Hymn to St Cecilia) imitating
the limited range of a novice guitar or lute
player. It’s a sophisticated joke to end a cycle
of rare sincerity and sweetness from Britten.
Composed in 1943, The Ballad of Little Musgrave
and Lady Barnard is a concise masterpiece.
Britten takes an anonymous ballad and morphs
it into a sophisticated exercise in musical
narrative. Set for the unusual ensemble of men’s
voices and piano, the work was composed
for officers in a German concentration
camp, where it was performed during their
incarceration. It’s a heady tale of lust, murder
and revenge, in which Lord Barnard kills his
wife and her lover. Each stage of the story
is minutely wrought, from the tolling church
bells of the opening (heard in the piano) that
transform into the hooves of Barnard’s horse,
to the duel between the two men, and finally
the mourning song of the grieving husband.
Coherence and continuity – of theme, music or
treatment – may have characterised Britten’s
earlier cycles, but Sacred and Profane is more
interested in contrast and oppositions. The
conflict of the work’s title permeates this riotous,
virtuosic work that celebrates the cultural
collisions of medieval England. It’s as though
the two choirs of the Hymn to the Virgin have
come together as one, lurching artfully from
the spiritual to the emphatically secular.
It’s curious that so energetic a work (both in
its vocal demands and the complexity of its
invention) should have emerged so late in
Britten’s career. By 1975 the composer was
ill; heart surgery had prolonged his life but
had also weakened him. Yet the same late
surge that produced Death in Venice and the
cantata Phaedra also yielded this choral cycle,
composed for the five unaccompanied SSATB
voices of Peter Pears’s Wilbye Consort. Writing
for soloists rather than massed choral forces,
Britten allows himself unusual freedom and
range in constructing his vocal lines, and the
effect is striking for its freewheeling athleticism.
We open in pious mood; ‘St Godric’s Hymn’
has the stark, declamatory intensity of a Poulenc
motet, but soon regains its Brittenish flavour as
harmonies thicken and meander. Before the
prayer has a chance to rise up to heaven the
animal cries and wails of ‘I mon waxe wod’
break in – as vivid a musical evocation of
madness as ever composed. The spiritual and
secular collide directly in the vivid imagery of
‘Lenten is come’, delighting in the wriggling,
teeming signs of spring life, that are soon
subdued by darkness in ‘The long night’. Sober
meditation on Christ’s crucifixion (‘Yif ic of
luve can’) is likewise interrupted by the pulsing
babble of the ‘Carol’, just as Christ’s invitation
to behold his death on the cross (‘Ye that pasen
by’) has the rug pulled quickly from under it
by the meticulous catalogue of human frailties
of ‘A death’. Here, an old woman laboriously
describes her bodily disintegration, facing
death with a final insouciant bit of defiance:
‘For the whole world I don’t care a jot!’ It’s a
brave and heroic final stand from a composer
whose own health was nearly exhausted,
and who would be dead within a year.
Programme note © Alexandra Coghlan
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