An internationally acclaimed composer from “the land without music”, the reviver of British opera and co-founder of the Aldeburgh festival: Benjamin Britten is firmly ensconced in our national cultural pantheon. The time when he and his soon to be life-partner, the tenor Peter Pears, boarded an ocean liner and travelled to North America in spring 1939 as “a vacation from the general European atmosphere” – not returning until mid-1942 – has proved harder to celebrate. But in a season marking the 50th anniversary of the composer’s death, the Britten Sinfonia have grasped the nettle.
The result is a programme split mainly between works by Britten and Aaron Copland, who spent the summer of 1939 together in Woodstock. Cue tennis, swimming and mutual admiration. But Britten was also hard at work – first on his Young Apollo, a fanfare commissioned by the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, and then on his song cycle Les Illuminations. Directing from the violin, Zoë Beyers launched a taut, witty performance of the former. Amid so much energetically engaged string playing, pianist Huw Watkins’ mercurial scales and delicate sweeps of glissando provoked audible giggles of delight from audience members behind me.
Les Illuminations showcased a subtler encounter between musical languages. Soprano Elizabeth Watts was relentlessly communicative and in total expressive control from her harshest lower register to the creamiest top notes, while the Britten Sinfonia revelled in the score’s rotation of solo lines, impish pizzicato and fierce, characterful details. Separating Britten’s works, the Six Piano Preludes by writer and composer Paul Bowles hat-tipped a period when he and Britten fought over rights to the piano in a Brooklyn Heights houseshare. Watkins relished the woozy poetry of miniatures that might almost have been overheard in a jazz bar.
After the interval, Ukrainian clarinettist Oleg Shebeta-Dragan was the soloist in a blistering performance of Copland’s Clarinet Concerto that, for all its breathtaking virtuosity, was a thoroughly collective, collaborative affair. To close, Copland’s ballet Appalachian Spring, performed in its original chamber scoring, travelled the gamut from crystalline vulnerability to weighted, rustic bowing and quasi-machinic precision. In this performance the work’s flipbook of contrasts felt utterly inevitable, emerging organically from the ongoing musical conversation.
• At The Apex, Bury St Edmunds, on 19 May, and The Halls, Norwich, on 20 May
