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2013 marks the centenary of Benjamin Britten's birth and major
celebrations are planned across the world, making this the widest
ever global celebration of a British composer. Faber Music, which
was founded and nurtured by Britten, will be marking the occasion
with a series of centenary publications, including the previously
unpublished 6 Early Songs. These early songs were writt en during
the composer's schooldays, whilst he was studying with Frank
Bridge. But even at this tender age, Britten already had such
accomplished works as Quatre Chansons Francaises under his belt.
The songs on the one hand display Britten's school-boyish
imagination (witches, owls and moths), while on the other show a
more brooding side, not to menti on confident piano writi ng and an
innate understanding of vocal drama. Previously unpublished, these
six songs are an important new addition to the solo song repertory.
Jubilate Deo, in the key of E for mixed voices with organ
accompaniment, is the lesser known of Benjamin Britten's settings
of Psalm 100, and was intended as a companion piece to the Te Deum
in C, and is an exuberant, joyful sing. The piece remained
unpublished until after Britten's death. Purchase the sheet music
arranged for accompanied mixed voices.
The third volume of the annotated selected letters of composer
Benjamin Britten covers the years 1946-51, during which he wrote
many of his best-known works, founded and developed the English
Opera Group and the Aldeburgh Festival, and toured widely in Europe
and the United States as a pianist and conductor. Correspondents
include librettists Ronald Duncan (The Rape of Lucretia), Eric
Crozier (Albert Herring, Saint Nicolas, The Little Sweep) and E. M.
Forster (Billy Budd); conductor Ernest Ansermet and composer Lennox
Berkeley; publishers Ralph Hawkes and Erwin Stein of Boosey &
Hawkes; and the celebrated tenor Peter Pears, Britten's partner.
Among friends in the United States are Christopher Isherwood,
Elizabeth Mayer and Aaron Copland, and there is a significant
meeting with Igor Stravinsky. This often startling and innovative
period is vividly evoked by the comprehensive and scholarly
annotations, which offer a wide range of detailed information
fascinating for both the Britten specialist and the general reader.
Donald Mitchell contributes a challenging introduction exploring
the interaction of life and work in Britten's creativity, and an
essay examining for the first time, through their correspondence,
the complex relationship between the composer and the writer Edward
Sackville-West.
This definitive encyclopaedic work explores the origins of
percussion through the development of the early drums and
xylophones right up to the wide range of modern instruments and the
sounds they make. James Blades covers these early developments
globally from China and the Far East, India and Tibet, the early
civilisations in Mesopotamia, Egypt, Greece, Rome and Persia
through to mediaeval and renaissance Europe. He continues to
examine the role of percussion in the classical and romantic
orchestras and finally looks at the ways composers have pushed the
boundaries in modern music. Each chapter has its own photographs,
illustrations and bibliography and there are comprehensive indices
referencing all the composers and works discussed. This extended
edition includes two important new chapters. The first covers the
rise of the solo percussionist and is written by the world's
leading practitioner and one of Blades' former pupils, Dame Evelyn
Glennie, who also contributes a new Foreword, while recent
developments in orchestral percussion are covered by Neil Percy,
Head of Timpani and Percussion at the Royal Academy of Music and
Principal Percussionist of the London Symphony Orchestra.
Benjamin Britten's The Company Of Heaven is a dramatic work of
considerable substance, from which individual movements may be
performed separately as anthems or concert works. The work sets a
variety of texts from authors as varied as John Ruskin, Francis
Thompson, Christina Rossetti, Blake and Bunyan, arranged for SATB
chorus, soprano and tenor soloists, and orchestra, with a piano
reduction in this vocal score.
Benjamin Britten's setting of Edith Sitwell's poem Praise We Great
Men is arranged for SATB soli with mezzo soprano part, a mixed
voices chorus and orchestra, and this vocal score includes a piano
reduction for rehearsal purposes. The piece was left unfinished at
Britten' death. It was being written for Mstislav Rostropovich to
include in his first season with the National Symphony Orchestra of
Washington D.C, in 1977. The manuscript breaks off after 118 bars,
near the end of the fifth of an intended ten sections. The fragment
therefore amounts to at most half the work, but it is fully
composed. A further two bars were found sketched in one of
Britten's notebooks and were added to this score in 1985, when it
was revised by the composer, Colin Matthews, ahead of its first
performance.
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Elegy (Paperback)
Benjamin Britten
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R252
R201
Discovery Miles 2 010
Save R51 (20%)
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Out of stock
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Britten's Elegy was first performed at The Maltings in Snape,
Suffolk, by Nobuko Imai in 1984 as part of the 37th Aldburgh
festival. This beautiful piece was originally sketched by Britten
in 1930 upon leaving school at the age of sixteen.
This second of two volumes of the letters and diaries of Benjamin
Britten is supplemented by the editors' detailed commentary and
extensive contemporary documentation. The aim is to present a
portrait not only of the composer but of an age.
Volume One of these remarkable letters and diaries opens with a
letter from Britten aged nine to his formidable mother, Edith.
Music is already at the centre of his life, and it accompanies him
through prep and public school and then to London to the Royal
College of Music, where the phenomenally gifted but inexperienced
young composer is plunged into metropolitan life and makes
influential new friends, among them W. H. Auden and Christopher
Isherwood. This was a time of prodigious musical creativity, a
growing awareness of his sexuality, and the dawning of his
political convictions. Most importantly, during this period Britten
met Peter Pears and established the musical and personal
relationship that was to last a lifetime. Volume One comes to a
close in May 1939, when Britten, accompanied by Pears, departs for
North America. The letters and diaries in this illuminating first
volume and its successor are supplemented by the editors' detailed
commentary and by exhaustive contemporary documentation. Together
they constitute a comprehensive portrait not only of the composer
but of an age.
Edward Gardner conducts the English National Opera Orchestra and
Chorus in this production of Benjamin Britten's final opera based
on the novella by Thomas Mann. John Graham-Hall plays Gustav von
Aschenbach, an ageing novelist who becomes obsessed with Polish boy
Tadzio (Sam Zaldivar). The performance was recorded at The London
Coliseum in June 2013.
Director Tony Britten's drama documentary examines the acclaimed
composer's lifelong commitment to pacifism. Using a dramatic
narrative to explore the development of Britten's pacifist beliefs
during the time he spent at the liberally progressive Gresham's
School in Norfolk between the years of 1928-1930, the film charts a
time which marked a crucial period of the composer's personal and
musical development. Interwoven throughout are contemporary
performances of the composer's works and contributions from,
amongst others, conductor and composer Joseph Horovitz, cellists
Anita Lasker Wallfisch and Raphael Wallfisch, and Britten's agent
for many years, Sue Phipps. John Hurt narrates.
Andris Nelsons leads the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra in
this 50th anniversary performance of Benjamin Britten's War
Requiem. The piece was commissioned to mark the consecration of the
new Coventry Cathedral, which was built after the original
fourteenth-century structure was destroyed in a World War II
bombing raid in 1940. 50 years after its premiere it returns to the
cathedral to be performed, as it was on its first airing, by the
the City of Birmingham Orchegstra, Chorus, and Youth Chorus. The
featured vocalists are Erin Wall, Mark Padmore and Hanno
Müller-Brachmann.
Written during Britten's years in the USA (1939-1942) this
atmospheric processional languished unperformed in a New York
library until its discovery in 1976, the year of the composer's
death. It was finally premiered in Birmingham by Simon Rattle and
shows the young composer paying a passing tribute to the musical
styles prevalent in his country of residence.
'Very rich, and quite often ecstatic' was how Osian Ellis described
Benjamin Britten's Suite for Harp, an attractive piece in five
movements which explores the instrument's full expressive range.
Composed for Ellis in 1969, and now considered one of the
cornerstones of 20th-century harp repertoire, this 14-minute work
features a majestic 'Overture', nervous 'Toccata', an atmospheric
'Nocturne' and a quicksilver 'Fugue'. As an extra tribute to Ellis,
the Theme and Variations which closes the Suite draws upon the
Welsh hymn tune St Denio.
Benjamin Britten's opera, composed to celebrate the Coronation of
Queen Elizabeth II in 1953. He took as his starting point Lytton
Strachey's 'Elizabeth and Essex'. Sarah Walker and Anthony Rolfe
Johnson star.
This landmark publication includes 61 songs, combining the contents
of the seven published books of Britten folksong arrangements in
High and Low Voice editions. Some of the songs have never before
been transposed. The songs of Volume 6, for voice and guitar, have
been transcribed for voice and piano for this edition.
In 1935 Britten hinted that a "large and elaborate suite for oboe
and strings" was gestating in his mind. However, this work did not
materialize and instead he wrote the Temporal Variations for oboe
and piano. In 1994, at the suggestion of oboist Nicholas Daniel,
the composer and Britten pupil, Colin Matthews, arranged the piano
part for string orchestra, a medium particularly apt as the
composer's next work was to be the Variations on a Theme of Frank
Bridge. The result is a dazzling concertante work that is surely
destined for repertoire status.
Steuart Bedford conducts the Britten-Pears Orchestra in this
production of Benjamin Britten's opera, recorded on the beach at
the Aldeburgh Festival. The performance stars Alan Oke as the
eponymous character with Giselle Allan as Ellen Orford and David
Kempster as Captain Balstrode.
Jamie Walton performs three suites for solo cello composed by
Benjamin Britten. His performance is captured in Blythburgh's Holy
Trinity Church in Suffolk, England.
Collection of scenes from 12 productions performed at the
Glyndeboure Festival Opera over the last 13 years. The operas
featured are: 'Le nozze di Figaro', 'The Cunning Little Vixen',
'Gianni Schicchi', 'Cosi fan tutte', 'Billy Budd', 'Falstaff',
'Carmen', 'Giulio Cesare', 'Tristan und Isolde', 'The Rake's
Progress', 'La Cenerentola' and 'Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg'.
David McVicar's acclaimed production of Benjamin Britten's chamber
opera, recorded live during its premiere run at the Aldeburgh
Festival in 2001. Paul Daniel leads the English National Opera,
with performances by Sarah Connolly, Christopher Maltman, Catherine
Wyn-Rogers and Mary Nelson.
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