Word: aldeburgh
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...premiere last week by the New York City Opera was, alas, not all it should have been: the acting was often wooden, the settings short on mystery and magic. Nonetheless, the production was good enough to suggest that Ariadne-first performed three years ago at England's Aldeburgh Festival-is a potential classic...
...show the soulful, reflective side of his nature. The declamatory, powerful War Requiem (1962), which deploys huge forces and intersperses liturgical Latin with antiwar poetry, is perhaps his best work. Not one to compose in a vacuum or ivory tower, Britten in 1948 joined with friends to found the Aldeburgh Festival in a little town on the bleak Suffolk coast he called home...
...implantation of an artificial heart valve. He came out of the anesthesia with partial paralysis of his right arm. The pity was that it ended his performing career. Playing with Cellist Mstislav Rostropovich and his friend Tenor Peter Pears, with whom he shared a semi-manorial brick house in Aldeburgh, Britten was a deft, expressive accompanist at the piano. He was an exceptional conductor, not only of his own works but also of Bach, Purcell and Mozart. His graceful, impassioned version of Mozart's Symphony No. 40 in G minor, for example, is the best on records...
...musically as well as personally. It is the latest in an imperiled series of major artistic collaborations. Britten, 59, recovering from open-heart surgery, was unable to attend rehearsals or take his customary place at the podium for the opera's premiere a fortnight ago. Steuart Bedford, an Aldeburgh regular, conducted in Britten's stead...
After the current run at the 670-seat Aldeburgh Festival Theater, opera and cast move to the Royal Opera at Covent Garden this fall, and a year later to New York's Metropolitan Opera. Although such an intimate drama could well be lost in those huge houses, it is clear that the ailing master of English opera has fused moral theme with artistic creation into what Thomas Mann himself might have hailed as Britten's Gesamtkunstwerk. *Lawrence Malkin