Word: brittens
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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When his first opera, Peter Grimes, got its U.S. premiere last year at the Berkshire Music Festival, Britain's bright young Benjamin Britten complained: "There is no use pretending it was a professional performance, but for students it was extremely good...
This week The Rape of Lucretia, the second opera from Composer Britten's one-a-year production line,* got a professional U.S. premiere from Chicago's vigorous young Opera Theater. Chicago, in turn, got what was, by the current depressed standards of opera-writing, a bang-up opera. Like the British, who first applauded The Rape a year ago, the audience in Chicago's Shubert Theatre found that homely, curly-haired Composer Britten, at 33, was not yet a new Richard Strauss come to judgment. But critics liked his forcefully discordant, often tender music, well married...
Like smart young Composer Gian-Carlo (The Medium) Menotti (TIME, March 3), Britten has written for a small cast and a chamber orchestra so that his opera can be performed easily and often. His newest music is easier to listen to than to sing. Said Baritone Frank Rogier, who sang the role of Seducer Tarquinius: "Any time you sound in tune with the orchestra, you're off. So you go in the other direction." But Britten's insistent, subtle use of rhythmic and dissonant backgrounds put a wallop into Librettist Ronald Duncan's seething play. The opera...
Grand opera, like port wine, is a commodity the English are in the habit of importing. No Englishman has ever written a successful opera, though young Benjamin Britten's may one day make the grade, (TIME, Aug. 19). Even good English opera singers are rare. London has long been without a topnotch opera company...
...fault that opera is a declining art (the last first-rate popular opera was written in 1910), but the Met so far has done nothing to encourage the most promising opera composer of the day, England's young Benjamin (Peter Grimes) Britten (TIME...