Britten Sinfonia: Britten’s American Review – delightful music from a fruitful holiday | Britten Sinfonia

An world-renowned singer from the “land without music”, revivalist of British theater and co-founder of the Aldeburgh festival: Benjamin Britten it is rooted in our cultural heritage. It is time that he and his friend will soon be friends for life, and and Peter Pearshe boarded a submarine and went to North America in 1939 as a “holiday from European culture” – not returning until mid-1942 – has been hard to celebrate. But in the season commemorating the 50th anniversary of the singer’s death, the Britten Symphony they have caught a nettle.

The result is a division of the program mainly between the works of Britten and Aaron Copland, who were together in the summer of 1939 in Woodstock. Show tennis, swimming and appreciation. But Britten was also hard at work – first on Young Apollo, a fanfare commissioned by the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, then on his own Les Illuminations. Led by the violin, Zoë Beyers launched into a raucous, classic-looking performance. Amidst powerful string riffs, pianist Huw Watkins’ mercurial scales and sweeping glissandos elicited gleeful laughter from the audience behind me.

Les Illuminations showed a subtle encounter between musical languages. Soprano Elizabeth Watts was consistently vocal and vocally commanding from her lowest register to her highest notes, while Britten Symphony it was enthralled by the flexibility of the individual lines, the sinister pizzicato and the haunting, detailed scenes. Separating Britten’s works, Seven Songs for the Piano by author and composer Paul Bowles chronicled the time he and Britten fought for the right to play the piano in a Brooklyn Heights apartment. Watkins reveled in the vivid poetry of the little things we might have heard in a jazz bar.

After this period, the Ukrainian clarinetist Oleg Shebeta-Dragan was the soloist in Copland’s delightful Clarinet Concerto that, for all its virtues, was harmonious and harmonious. To close, Copland’s ballet’s Appalachian Spring, which was performed in its original chamber, moved the performance from crystal danger to weight, rustic bowing and absolute precision. In this play, the book of contrasts of the work felt inevitable, which emerged from the ongoing musical dialogue.