Word: brittens
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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...Symphony Orchestra in nine concerts. U.S. premieres: Dmitri Shostakovich's new and brief (25-minute) Ninth Symphony, which Koussevitzky enthusiastically describes as "absolutely classic in form until sometimes it is very near to Haydn," and Peter Grimes, a widely touted opera in English by England's Benjamin Britten, commissioned by Koussevitzky and first played in London in 1945. The student production will be conducted by Leonard Bernstein, most famous of Koussevitzky's bright young...
Died. Fred Albert Britten, 74, longtime Republican Representative from Illinois (1913-34), who fought for a big navy and moral rearmament, against prohibition and diplomats; in Bethesda...
...turn away crowds. Last week's show at the Adelphi sold better than the last time the London Philharmonic played there. To the first session Gross invited a handful of notables to come and hear for themselves. Sir Adrian Boult, Pianist Myra Hess and Composer Benjamin Britten sent regrets, but Mrs. Anthony Eden came, and wrote a fan letter. Tenor Richard Tauber stuck it out for two hours, then said politely: "This is ... a complete change from the music to which I am accustomed...
...first time since the 1940 blitz, when German bombs drowned out a performance of Faust, London's Sadler's Wells Theater reopened last week. Opening night, the premiere of Benjamin Britten's tragic opera, Peter Grimes, was London's biggest musical event in five years...
Critics pronounced Britten's music full of "vitality" and "force," but found something a little "fierce" in the libretto's psychological case history of a sadistic Suffolk fisherman (adapted from a 19th-Century poem by George Crabbe). The boyish, mild-looking composer (when he was eight he wrote an angry song to be sung by God) indignantly denied that his tale of a madman was gloomy: "It is the struggle of the individual against the masses ... a subject very close to my heart...