‘I’ve always loved Britten’s music. He’s a composer who has such a broad range of work, and this is music of a special and singular power.’ Wes Anderson, film director ‘I do identify with Britten’s deeply held convictions… In the War Requiem he used the themes in the texts that he chose to make statements about humanity, and in that sense we have to put him up there with Beethoven in terms of his feeling of the nobility of the human spirit.’ John Adams, composer
In this anniversary year, we hear a truly international view of Britten – the first composer from our own shores to achieve widespread global recognition. Russian-born, German-trained Principal Conductor and Artistic Advisor Vladimir Jurowski conducts two of Britten’s large-scale masterworks and a concert of seldom-played orchestral music.
Britten
Had he not died in 1976, Benjamin Britten would be 100 years old in 2013. Being a man who lived to work, he might have produced countless additional masterpieces to those we already know. But more importantly, he’d have seen the world progress. Those fierce arguments for social change that thrust out of his operas would surely appear so close to winning through. In that sense, he was a composer truly ahead of his time.
Long before he took on the Principal Conductorship of the London Philharmonic Orchestra, Jurowski had Britten never shied away from letting already proved consistently illuminating and full of renewal as an interpreter his pacifism and homosexuality drive his works. It gave them a fierce realism, of English music. We know Jurowski a different, dark brand of verismo new has a distinct way with Britten’s sense of ‘clear complexity’, and in this to the opera and concert stage. Britten anniversary year we have the chance was truly a man of contradictions: to hear him in a comprehensive survey a darling of the establishment but considered by many to be an outsider; of the composer’s music for orchestra and voices. an Englishman rooted so firmly to his homeland and yet absorbing the ‘… this neat assemblage of early internationalism of the music scene Britten contains wonderful things. like few others. The LPO responds marvellously to Vladimir Jurowski’ The Guardian on Jurowski conducting Britten on the LPO label (LPO-0037)
05