Word: britten
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...Shutter's Creak. The Plague is neither as sustained nor complex as Benjamin Britten's War Requiem, but it invites comparison to that modern masterwork in its personal comment on a desperate universal theme. A Spanish exile who lives in near hermitry outside Cambridge, Gerhard spent more than a year fashioning his brilliantly distilled-libretto from Stuart Gilbert's translation of the novel, then found the music for his words in six more months. The score has only the merest wisps of melody, but the music achieves some deeply stirring and unnerving moments -as when an orchestral...
Since his opera Peter Grimes brought him to world prominence (TIME cover, Feb. 16, 1948), Britten has turned out a varied and impressive body of work, including nine other operas, a ballet, and everything from songs to symphonies, Masses to metamorphoses. Beyond composition, his talents sparkle with equal virtuosity. He is a gifted conductor, and when he accompanied Cellist Mstislav Rostropovich on the piano in the premiere of a Britten cello sonata, one critic called him "the compleat musician, a perpetual challenge to the age of specialization...
...Benjamin Britten: War Requiem (London). Britten conducts the Bach and Highgate school choirs and the London Symphony Orchestra (Vishnevskaya, Pears and Fischer-Dieskau, soloists) in a reverent performance...
Often chided for a lack of innovation in his music, Britten has wisely scorned the sterile world of experimentation for its own sake. With the maturation of his talents has come a taste for "the slender sound of, say, Mozart or Verdi or Mahler." An early enthusiasm for Beethoven is gone: "It's really quite sloppy, you know." Brahms he cannot abide. "I play through all his music every so often to see if I am right," Britten worried recently. "I usually find that I underestimated last time...
Dust & Cobwebs. "Britten has never claimed to be an innovator," argues Tenor Peter Pears, his longtime friend and the voice for whom most of his work is composed. "There blows through his vocal music, at least, a strong, revitalizing southeast wind which has rid English song of much accumulated dust and cobwebs. If Britten is no innovator, he is most certainly a renovator...