Night Music with Mark Padmore and Maxim Rysanov

Cambridge West Road Concert Hall
Thursday 23 October 2008

Norwich Theatre Royal
Friday 24 October 2008

Blythburgh Blythburgh Church
Saturday 25 October 2008 (slightly different programme to the rest of the tour)

London Southbank Centre’s Queen Elizabeth Hall
Monday 27th Ocotber 2008

Southampton Turner Sims Concert Hall
Tuesday 28th October 2008

Two articles featured in our programme books for this tour: Mark Padmore - Dream Weaver - published 25 October 2008 - and an article by Kate Kennedy - The strangest and remotest thing’: Time, Night, and Britten’s Nocturne.

The Guardian
Evening Standard
MusicOMH.com
Musicweb International
The Times
The Financial Times
Eastern Daily Press/East Anglian Daily Times
The Classical Source

 

The Guardian
Britten Sinfonia, Queen Elizabeth Hall, London 
By Andrew Clements
Friday 31 October 2008 (4 stars)

The Southbank Centre’s latest affectation seems to be an exercise in sensory deprivation, plunging the Queen Elizabeth Hall into stygian darkness during and between performances, in the deluded belief that musical understanding is enhanced if the audience cannot read anything about what they are hearing during a concert. The London Sinfonietta did it in a half-baked way in their all-Grisey programme two weeks ago, and here the Britten Sinfonia was at it as well, though they at least had the excuse that their concert was called Night Music. What made this so involving, however, was the intelligence of the programming, and the care and efficiency with which it was performed, rather than the fact that it took place in a crepuscular gloom for which two “staging consultants” were credited, one of them the director Katie Mitchell - classy gloom, indeed.

Each half had its own logic. The first traced an arc that began with Stravinsky’s spiky Fanfare for a New Theatre and went straight into Birtwistle’s rarely heard and rather Stravinskyan Prologue, a 1971 setting of lines from Aeschylus’s Agamemnon for tenor and seven instruments. Then came Britten’s Dowland reflections Lachrymae, in the string-orchestra version that was his last completed composition, and, finally, two tenor arias from Handel’s Samson. After the interval, more Britten (his Nocturne) was prefaced by another string paraphrase, John Woolrich’s achingly expressive Ulysses Awakes, based on the hero’s great aria at the beginning of Monteverdi’s Il Ritorno d’Ulisse.

The two soloists were exemplary. Maxim Rysanov was the self-effacing, intensely poetic viola player in the Lachrymae and the Woolrich, while Mark Padmore sang Birtwistle, Handel and Britten with equal assurance, unswerving musicality and fabulously clear enunciation, which was just as well in the circumstances.

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Evening Standard
Mark Pamore and Britten Sinfonia provide brilliance
By Fiona Maddocks
28 October 2008 (five stars)

Late in life, Handel is said to have wept when he heard his own Total Eclipse, from the oratorio Samson. How overwhelming must the line “No Sun, no Moon, all dark amidst the Blaze of Noon” have felt to the elderly composer, now blind and eclipsed in his own world of darkness?This short, hearfelt aria, with “Thus when the sun” from the same work, formed the emotional still point of a concert by the pioneering and talented Britten Sinfonia, loosely themed on night, dreams, sleeping, waking, death.

The evening was devised by tenor Mark Padmore who, after his explorations of Bach’s Passions, is gaining a parallel reputation as a programme maker of imagination and perception. Katie Mitchell provided a simple, effective staging: lighting was low, musicians moved to their places with minimal fuss so each piece followed without interruption.

Few works are more melancholy than Britten’s Lachrymae, a plangent meditation for viola and orchestra on John Dowland’s lute-song Flow My Tears. The Ukrainian Maxim Rysanov was the bewitching soloist, who also featured in John Woolrich’s Ulysses Awakes, an answering echo in atmosphere and colour to the Britten.  Playing close to the finger-board, or on the bridge, he achieves a tone quality that is ghostly, almost incorporeal.

At the start, Stravinsky’s tiny Fanfare for the New Theatre (1964) sounded a brisk, arresting reveille. Two trumpets wrestled atonally in energetic dialogue, leading straight into Harrison Birtwistle’s Prologue (1971).  The agonised words are those of Aeschylus’s Night Watchman, exhausted and waiting for the return of Agamemnon from the Trojan Wars.  Padmore, surrounded by six solo instruments, gave powerful utterance to this plea for release from vigil, ending with the unaccompanied imprecation: “A man’s will nurses hope”.

Britten’s Nocturne, for tenor and ensemble, was written for Peter Pears in 1958.  This fine cycle sets contrasting poems by Wordsworth, Keats and others in magical dialogue with solo instruments — glissandoing harp, disturbingly chromatic timpani, urgent, explosive bassoon.  Padmore’s great gift, apart from his prodigious technical ability, whether to float a line with perfect legato or to enter pianissimo at the top of his range, is to sing from the soul.

Joviality has its place in music but its most life-enhancing consolations often derive from the darkest materials.

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Britten Sinfonia/Mark Padmore
Queen Elizabeth Hall, London, 27 October 2008
By Simon Thomas (four stars)

http://www.musicomh.com/classical/britten-sinfonia_1008.htm

For the first concert of their 2008/9 season, Britten Sinfonia gave us a little night music, in a thought-provoking collaboration with tenor Mark Padmore. A varied and particularly well-chosen programme was given a hint of theatricality, with the help of theatre director Katie Mitchell, which saw subtle use of lighting helping support the themed moods.
 
Various stages of gloom, together with expressive groupings of musicians and an almost seamless evolution from piece to piece created an unusual cohesion. One wonders why this sort of thing isn’t done more often – if the same kind of effect were achieved in concert performances of operas, the term “semi-staged” might be more appropriate than it usually is – although over-done or heavy-handed, the approach could turn the enterprise gimmicky.

One draw-back was that it was impossible to follow the words in the programme but this seemed a limited loss given the benefits. The works certainly flowed, with the briefest of openings, Stravinsky’s 40-second Fanfare for a New Theatre leading straight into Harrison Birtwistle’s invigorating and brass-heavy Prologue, a setting of the Nightwatchman’s speech that begins the great Oresteia of Aeschylus. For those with long memories, it was a casting back to the early 80s, when Birtwistle underscored Peter Hall’s impressive masked trilogy at the National Theatre.

Britten’s gorgeous late re-working of a John Dowland song, Lachrymae (in the arrangement for viola and orchestra) followed, with the charismatic Maxim Rysanov as soloist. The ten variations wind mournfully through various stages of love and death before Dowland’s beautiful song emerges fully at the end.

After the interval, a similarly modern take on an old tune had Rysanov again leading the strings through John Woolrich’s superb take on Monteverdi, with Ulysses Awakes. Again, a very fine performance from the dark-clad soloist, and a work that deserves much wider exposure.

Padmore took us into the interval with two arias from Handel’s Samson: Total Eclipse and Thus When the Sun; beautifully phrased and played by the strings with a precision and weight that was a far cry from “authentic” practise (and refreshing for it).

A more traditional arrangement of the larger string ensemble was adopted for the centrepiece of the evening, Britten’s song-cycle Nocturne, enjoying its 50th birthday this year. Surrounding the tenor in a tight inner circle were the excellent obligato soloists – bassoon, harp, horn, timpani, cor anglais and flute/clarinet - who in turn accompany the vocalist as Britten takes us through eight cycles of sleep, based on verses by the likes of Shelley, Wilfred Owen and Shakespeare.

The Sinfonia sparkled with the magical somnolence, redolent of the composer’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream, of the first few movements (Shelley, Tennyson and Coleridge), reaching a height of terror in Wordsworth’s evocation of the French Revolution and followed by the haunting accusations of Owen’s The Kind Ghosts, which pre-figures the War Requiem of a few years later.

Padmore, compelling throughout, brought characterisation to Thomas Middleton’s poem (Midnight’s bell goes ting, ting, ting, ting, ting), the horn obligato cheekily imitating the crickets, nibbling mice and cat’s mew.

As the first in an ongoing collaboration between Padmore and Britten Sinfonia, this atmospheric evening boded well for future concerts in the series, representing an enjoyable and well-researched approach to themed programming. This concert will be broadcast on BBC Radio 3 on Monday 3 November at 7.00pm. Worth tuning in.

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Seen and Heard Concert Review
‘Night Music’ 
by Mark Berry
http://www.musicweb-international.com/sandh/2008/Jul-Dec08/britten_sinfonia2310.htm


This was an excellent concert, constructed around Mark Padmore’s choice of Britten’s Nocturne as a work with which to inaugurate a new collaboration with the Britten Sinfonia. The connections between the works were genuine and interesting but never merely didactic. It seemed generous of Padmore to share the limelight with violist Maxim Rysanov, soloist in two of the works presented, but that generosity was repaid with fine performances indeed.

Stravinsky’s brief fanfare – almost beating Webern at his own game – made for a splendid opening gambit. Two trumpeters, Paul Archibald and Tom Rainer, brought precision and tonal warmth, the echoes of the Toccata to Orfeo setting down a marker for John Woolrich’s Monteverdi explorations, as well as leading almost seamlessly into the world of Birtwistle’s Prologue. The baleful quality of Birtwistle’s writing was captured by Padmore and members of the Sinfonia, the reappearance of the trumpet underlining the connection between the two pieces. Padmore’s diction was not always beyond reproach but it was interesting to hear a somewhat Brittenesque tonal quality applied to Birtwistle; I thought it worked rather well.

This led us to Britten himself: his final work, Lachrymae, in the version for viola and orchestra. Rysanov sported a strange, somewhat vampirish outfit. There could be no doubts, however, concerning his performance, nor as to his direction of the other players. The first bars were played vibrato-less, allowing the music then to blossom, as if bringing distant music from Dowland’s time more sharply into focus in our own. I liked the occasional hint of contrast between Rysanov’s ‘Russian’ string sound and the more ‘English’ quality of his colleagues. This was not overdone and was far from ever-present, but it put me in mind of Britten’s friendships with Rostropovich and Shostakovich. I liked even more the occasional hints of Berg, stronger as time went on, the appearance of Dowland’s music reminiscent of – though it could hardly be expected quite to match – the appearance of the Bach chorale in the Berg Violin Concerto. The young Britten, it may be recalled, had greatly desired to study with Berg in Vienna, a desire frustrated by the parochialism of his teachers at the Royal College of Music. Rysanov brought the music to considerable heights of passion, underpinned by a finely judged balance between rhythmic freedom and security. Britten’s musical transformations were lain bare, but never clinically so; there was a true sense of the cumulative power of musico-dramatic progression.

Two arias from Samson followed. I was rather surprised, given Padmore’s lengthy association with ‘authenticke’ conductors, at the wideness of his vibrato here. Indeed, it seemed excessive and was toned down considerably upon the return to Britten. I also wondered whether less might have been more when it came to employment of the head voice. Diction was much better in the first aria, ‘Total eclipse’, Samson’s lament for his lost sight, though it was more variable in ‘Thus when the sun’. Padmore’s melismata here were perfectly handled: each note crystal clear, yet never at the expense of phrasing. I was much taken with the reassuringly old-fashioned sturdiness – though never heaviness – to the playing of the Britten Sinfonia. Handel, who nowadays suffers some truly appalling perversities in the name of ‘authenticity’, had his dignity restored at last.

The second half opened with Woolrich’s Ulysses awakes, for me perhaps the highlight of the programme. The opening double-bass line led perfectly into Rysanov’s viola line, permitting Monteverdi’s music truly to blossom in its new surroundings. This was a passionately ‘inauthentic’ treatment, though it never succumbed to all-purpose Romanticism. Almost Purcellian in its melancholy, the reminder of the English Orpheus presented a bridge not only between Woolrich and Monteverdi but also between Woolrich, Britten, and Monteverdi. I could not help but think of Britten’s superlative recorded account of Purcell’s great Chacony in G minor. Harmonic horizons broadened yet Woolrich always remained faithful to the spirit of Monteverdi. A modernist halo was provided by the players of the Britten Sinfonia, a powerful reimagining – and here I thought of Henze’s realisation of Il ritorno d’Ulisse in patria – of Monteverdi’s continuo ensemble. I wondered whether one or two vocal phrase-endings were ever so slightly tossed away but, in the face of such a magnificent performance from Rysanov, this must be the most minor of criticisms. Far more to the point was the apt vocal flexibility to his reading, heightened by the faultless interplay between soloist – first among equals – and ensemble. This performance was, quite simply, outstanding.

We came finally to Britten’s Nocturne. Once again, the ever-flexible Britten Sinfonia was on excellent form, both as an ensemble and as soloists. There were certainly many opportunities for soloists to shine, all of them well taken: bassoon, harp, horn, timpani, oboe, flute, clarinet, and strings. The interludes between songs were all extremely fine. Britten’s sound-world announced itself from the very first bar, the strings’ sense of uneasy undulation during the setting of Shelley’s Prometheus unbound unerringly caught. Padmore had mastered the trickiness of the Peter Pears-inspired vocal writing, accomplishing what Pears himself defined as the role of technique: the liberation of the imagination.  There was a real sense of the magic and menace of Coleridge’s moonlight in The wanderings of Cain, not least thanks to the opening harp sounds and the gradual darkening of Padmore’s voice. Word-painting was attentive, for instance in the setting from Thomas Middleton’s Blurt, Master Constable. Here Padmore led us through the hopping of the cricket to the ‘peep, peep, peep, peep,’ of the goat, the latter with the able collaboration of Stephen Bell on French horn. Oboe and pizzicato strings made their mark in Owen’s The kind ghosts, followed by wonderfully flighty flute and clarinet in Keats’s Sleep and poetry. The scherzando quality those instruments imparted contrasted powerfully with the English stillness of the strings, Padmore not only connecting the two moods but leading and adapting to them. I thought, however, that his tone sounded bleached, even threadbare by the end of this movement: a pity, especially given the words: ‘... all the cheerful eyes that glance so brightly at the new sun-rise’. But there was compensation in the final Shakespeare sonnet (no.43) from the warm, ardent strings, and the sense of return at the end was impressively caught by all musicians.

It is worth saying a few words on presentation. Katie Mitchell and Lyndsey Turner were credited as ‘staging consultants’. There was, however, no ‘staging’ as would commonly be understood, save for the unavoidable fact of the performances taking place on a stage. It is not clear to me what can have been involved other than deciding where the musicians would be placed on stage and whether they stood or were seated. Such a task hardly seems to require two consultants but there was nothing objectionable to whatever it was they had done. To start with, I wondered whether having the musicians stand for Lachrymae was a deliberate evocation of the practice of earlier ‘players’ – as opposed to a modern orchestra – but in that case, it was far from clear why this should not have been applied to Ulysses awakes. No harm was done; perhaps I was missing something. On the other hand, the programme notes, were excellent: both the commentary to all but one of the pieces by Jo Kirkbride and the short essays from Padmore and Kate Kennedy. Woolrich wrote his own note, which deserves to be quoted in full, should that be the right phrase:

There are two great arias at the beginning of Monteverdi’s opera Il ritorno d’Ulisse in Patria: one for Penelope, and this one for Ulysses, waking on the shore of his homeland. In this retelling, the viola sings Ulysses.

Talk about letting the music speak for itself! Intentionally or otherwise, this seemed to me a clever strategy: without any more of a guide, one had to listen all the more closely. Perhaps, after the manner of Debussy giving titles to his piano Préludes at the end rather than the beginning, we could be treated to additional commentary following the performance.

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The Times
Britten Sinfonia at the Queen Elizabeth Hall
By Hilary Finch
October 29, 2008

A little night music seemed apt now that the world has turned on its dark side. But this was the Britten Sinfonia, and things were not quite as they seemed. Night Music was yet another programme that showed the ensemble’s imagination in reinventing the concert experience: Katie Mitchell was named as staging consultant, and there was a lighting designer, too.

As it happened, we were left in the dark. Some tetchy punters scrabbled with their programme notes; others simply sat on the edge of their seats, peering into the gloom. After a Stravinsky fanfare came a Birtwistle Prologue, sung by the tenor Mark Padmore, who was to be central to the entire evening. The Night Watchman from Aeschylus’s Agamemnon waits; and the voice duets with bassoon, horn, trumpet, trombone, violin and double bass in sombre hope.

A flutter of bows in the darkness, and on came the strings, standing round the viola soloist Maxim Rysanov for a performance of Britten’s Lachrymae. This was the composer’s orchestration of his elegy for viola, metamorphosing a song of Dowland. Rysanov seemed a dark magician, in black dress-coat streaked by scarlet embroidery, and playing with a haunting intensity, as the ensemble followed darkness like a dream.

This was followed, a little uneasily, by Padmore singing two crepuscular arias from Handel’s Samson: Total eclipse! and Thus when the sun. The Britten Sinfonia remained standing to play, surrounding Padmore in a coppery arc of light, as he stared fixedly ahead, singing with plangent intensity.

After the interval ten string players reflected the sensibility of the Lachrymae in John Woolrich’s spectral tribute to Monteverdi in Ulysses Awakes. And then, the evening’s raison d’être: the eight sensuous settings of English verse that form Britten’s Nocturne. Like the entire programme, this was performed by Padmore and the Britten Sinfonia with deep care and thoughtfulness, yet the chemistry didn’t quite spark, and the realisation failed fully to energise the idea.

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The Financial Times
Britten Sinfonia, Queen Elizabeth Hall, London
By Richard Fairman
October 28 2008

Audiences in search of night music usually think of Mozart or Sondheim, but not this time. Setting out on its first concert tour of the 2008-09 season, the Britten Sinfonia put together a programme that consisted almost wholly of 20th-century music illustrating themes of the night.

As though to make sure that the point was not missed, the concert was performed in almost total darkness. The performers, dressed in midnight black, crept on to the stage in the murk, doing their best not to bump into the music stands, while the audience sat in hushed silence, deprived of any reason to rustle their programmes.

The theatricality of the occasion may have seemed contrived, but the music-making was not. Maxim Rysanov joined the orchestra as viola soloist for two neatly paired works: John Woolrich’s Ulysses Awakes, based on arias from Monteverdi’s Il ritorno d’Ulisse in patria, and Britten’s Lachrymae, a set of variations on Dowland’s lute song “Flow My Tears”, with its invocation of “night’s black bird”. The viola takes the place of the singer in both and the Britten especially, subtly played in its haunting late orchestral version, was like entering a dream world.

The other items on the programme were undiluted vocal works, sung by the tenor Mark Padmore. He started with Harrison Birtwistle’s Prologue, newly revised for this concert tour, which sets a translation of the Night Watchman’s opening speech from Aeschylus’s Agamemnon. As so often with Birtwistle, the vocal part remains obstinately inexpressive, but there was compensation in instrumental sounds of typically mythic quality, such as wiry high violin duetting perilously with a portentous, low trombone.

There was more enjoyment to be had from Padmore’s two solos from Handel’s Samson – “Total Eclipse” and “Thus When the Sun” – and Britten’s song-cycle Nocturne on English poems of the night, 50 years old this year. Although the Britten might have benefited from having a conductor to keep up the momentum, Padmore proved the most responsive of interpreters and managed to be sensitive without becoming cutesy in the most picturesque poetry. The Britten Sinfonia’s soloists, especially Nicholas Daniel’s solo oboe, shone. A very imaginative concert, performed with flair by soloists and orchestra alike.

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The Eastern Daily Press/EADT
The Britten Weekend
By Tony Cooper
29 October 2008

Britten’s acclaimed opera The Rape of Lucretia - a stark, compelling drama of emotional intensity and a landmark work in the composer’s output - lay at the heart of a very satisfying musical weekend on the Suffolk coast.

With librettist, Ronald Duncan, the composer shaped a piece of great poise that contains some of his most ravishing music written to show how this concentrated operatic form can create an intensification of emotion with no loss of musical colour.

Performed by a talented and well-drilled cast of energetic young singers from the Britten-Pears Young Artist Programme, Blythe Gaissert sung and acted superbly Lucretia while Benedict Nelson was perfectly cast as the yobbish, lager-swilling soldier, Tarquinius, whose rape of her was delicately and emotionally well handled by the rising young theatre director Edward Dick, making his opera debut.

James Geer and Robyn Driedger-Klassen sung the pivotal roles of male chorus and female chorus with intensity and passion while the director used them as an integral part of the stage action as opposed to the statuesque-robed figures seen in ancient Greek drama and a style that Britten used for the opera’s debut at Glyndebourne in 1946.

But directional styles have changed considerably over the years and Edward Dick (who has worked with theatre group, Cheek by Jowl) explored every opportunity that the work offered and came up with a production that was fresh, innovative and dramatic in every sense of the word without losing the essence and the thrust of Greek tragedy. It’ll long be remembered and it’ll be hard to forget the striking and luminous lighting effects achieved so dramatically by Katharine Williams.

The Britten-Pears Chamber Orchestra - conducted by David Parry, the flamboyant choral director of the Norfolk and Norwich Festival - was in the pit and showed total clarity and preciseness in some very exciting playing. So it could be said of the Britten Sinfonia, too, coming straight to Blythburgh following great success in their opening concert of their new Norwich season at the Theatre Royal.

Their programme included Britten’s Lachrymae, Six Metamorphoses after Ovid for solo oboe, with Alex Tostdevine stepping in a short notice for the indisposed Nicholas Daniel. Only in his first year at Trinity it was a daunting task and the audience took him to their hearts after a very fine performance.

Directed from the violin by Jacqueline Shave - a former leader of the Britten-Pears Orchestra - we were also treated to Three Songs by Purcell realised by Tippett and orchestrated by John Woolrich, whose work, Ulysses Awakes - produced some virtuosic playing by violist Maxim Rysanov - while Mark Padmore and Steve Bell were so brilliantly paired in Britten’s Serenade for Tenor, Horn and Strings.

The Prince Consort at Orford delighted a packed house and sent everyone home on a high with a splendid programme entitled Orpheus Britannicus. Anna Leese (soprano) hit the mark with a fine rendering of Tippett’s The Heart’s Assurance while fellow soprano, Jennifer Johnston, did likewise with Britten’s Holy Sonnets of John Donne. Tim Mead (counter-tenor) shone throughout especially in three Purcell songs (arranged by Tippett) while the unsung hero of the ensemble - pianist Alisdair Hogarth - proved a master accompanist.

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From http://www.classicalsource.com
Britten Sinfonia – Night Music
by Colin Anderson
Monday, October 27, 2008

This attractive and thoughtfully planned programme credited two staging consultants for a concert that required no more than a quick-change of position between works (carried out in virtual darkness) and performances in minimal lighting (courtesy of Richard Howell). Mark Padmore was credited as ‘director’ but did nothing of the kind during his performances (when some guidance was needed for the players, Jacqueline Shave did the honours).

 Conversely the seemingly non-director Maxim Rysanov did offer some contact with the Britten Sinfonia beyond his viola-playing and offered a revelatory account of Britten’s Dowland-inspired Lachrymae (in its recasting for viola and strings) in which Rysanov’s wonderful tone and easeful phrasing brought to life (while remaining mostly subdued and enigmatic) music that can seem uneventful. Rysanov also brought depth to John Woolrich’s Ulysses Awakes (inspired by an aria from Monteverdi’s “Il ritorno d’Ulisse”), gravely beautiful music (with vigorous contrasts) again blessed by Rysanov’s compelling musicianship.

Beforehand, two excerpts from Handel’s “Samson” had caught the mood of the evening (“no sun, no moon…”) with Padmore and the string-players (with harpsichord and bassoon continuo) stylish advocates of these poignant arias, to which, earlier, Harrison Birtwistle’s “Prologue” (1971) was no stranger with its rather Brittenesque vocal line against a more-typical instrumental commentary (from violin, double bass, bassoon, horn, two trumpets and a trombone) that sets an English translation of part of Aeschylus’s “Agamemnon”. The concert had opened with Stravinsky’s Fanfare (1964), a gnarled if brief summons given with assurance by trumpeters Paul Archibald and Tom Rainer.

Fine as all this was, it was Padmore’s enthralling account of “Nocturne” that took (literally) all before it. The least-heard of Britten’s orchestral song-cycles, written for Peter Pears of course, this performance suggested it is arguably the greatest, growing from the (recurring) wisps of sound and binding different poets into a substantive and seamless whole.

The introducing of seven obbligato instruments adds diversity while being a precisely gauged addition for each setting – an incantation from bassoon (Ursula Leveaux) for Tennyson; enchanted roulades from harp (Lucy Wakeford) for Coleridge; a range of timbre from the horn (Stephen Bell) for Middleton; darkly muttering timpani (Bill Lockhart) for Wordsworth; plangent cor anglais (Nicholas Daniel, supposedly not playing due to illness and due to be replaced by Rysanov and his viola, but not the case) for Owen; and (not out of place in “Peter and the Wolf”) twittering flute and scampering clarinet (Kate Hill and Joy Farrall) for Keats.

Padmore’s assumption of the vocal part was mesmerising, both musically and poetically, and if there are times when Britten (“Nocturne” dates from 1958) seems to be looking back to earlier successes (“Spring Symphony”, “The Turn of the Screw” and “Albert Herring”) as well as anticipating the contemporaneous “A Midsummer Night’s Dream”, then in a performance of this sensitivity, security and perception, such references seemed only to enhance the music when illuminated by a performance of exceptional quality. 

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‘The strangest and remotest thing’: Time, Night, and Britten’s Nocturne
By Kate Kennedy
(written for our Night Music tour)

‘It won’t be madly popular because it is the strangest and remotest thing – but then dreams are strange and remote’
(Benjamin Britten, on his Nocturne)

Britten is famous for the variety and the quality of the poetry he set to music.  He was greatly influenced in his personal life and literary tastes by the poet WH Auden, and shared a passion for poetry with his partner the tenor Peter Pears, for whom the Nocturne was written in 1958.  Perhaps more than any other composer, Britten’s vocal music lends itself to a discussion of what it means to put poetry to music.  What is at stake?  What is lost, what is gained, and what kind of new entity is created?  TS Eliot, whom Britten set, wrote in his own exploration of the relationship between music and poetry, the Four Quartets:

Words move, music moves
Only in time; but that which is only living
Can only die.  Words after speech,
Reach into the silence.

It is this silence, perhaps, that Britten is interested in venturing into.  This works in two ways.  Firstly, in providing musical enhancement for his poetry he is helping the words to mean more, to resonate into the silence for longer.  He is also reaching into the silence beyond words thematically; inspired by his fascination with the night (which also characterises his other song cycle for tenor, the Serenade)  he has assembled eight poems that together create some idea of what happens when our unconscious takes over, and the night sounds replace the more mundane noises of the day.

Music, unlike art or literature, is characterised by having to take place in a specific time.  One conductor’s version of Bach’s St Matthew Passion can take 30 minutes longer than another’s, but however flexible, time is nevertheless inescapable in relation to music.  By choosing to infer the specific time scale of the night Britten can play around with another time span over and above the time it takes to listen to his piece, layering music and the hours of darkness together.  The work is a similar project to the poet Dylan Thomas’ radio play Under Milk Wood, written in 1953 and famously broadcast by the BBC a year later, only 4 years before Britten’s Nocturne was completed.  As a piece for radio it must play itself out in time, in a way a work written to be read does not. To structure their works both Britten and Thomas create an overarching view of the progression of the night, ending with the dawn and waking.  This structure allows Thomas to hold together a variety of different (often unconscious) voices from the townspeople, the omniscient narrator dipping in and out of their dreams.  

Britten’s different voices are those of the disparate poets he chooses, held together by his structure of the span of a night.  This device means that the differences between the texts become unimportant – they are put in dialogue with each other, and the dialogue becomes the central focus.  Some represent the eerie midnight time, others lighter dreams, others insomniac terror, or dreadful nightmares.  Together they provide a chart of a sleeper’s progress through the night, and as such hold the piece together in a narrative structure, which is reinforced by the music.  The orchestral link passage, a repeating figure in the strings that illustrates the breathing of the sleeper maintains the continuity between texts, moving the sleeper and listener from one dream state to the next.  Orchestra and texts are working together to give us an insight into a subconscious over the course of the night, and the continuity of breath following breath, dream following dream, carries us through this experience.  The strings’ ‘breathing’ serves a structural purpose, but also soothes the listener – a recurring motif that we recognise returns us to ourselves after a departure into each dream vignette.  

Having lulled us into this sense of security, Britten can then manipulate the reassurance sleep and repetitive breath provides to add his own particular emphasis to the meaning of his texts.  For instance, in the fifth song, an extract from Wordsworth’s Prelude, an insomniac who cannot allow himself to sleep is tortured by the memory of the French Revolution’s massacres a month before.  Here Britten the pacifist illustrates the seriousness of this horror by enacting the violence on his own music – jerking his ‘sleeper’ out of sleep, omitting the string’s breathing motif for the only time in the cycle, and abandoning melody itself, having the singer work himself up to an unpitched, hysterical near-scream of ‘sleep no more!’ 
Ironically, this lack of sleep is one of the two high points of the whole somnolent work.  Although the cycle of sleep has been so painfully interrupted, Wordsworth’s poem still involves cycles; the cycle of war continuing endlessly, and massacres repeating themselves: 

Year follows year, the tide returns again,
Day follows day, all things have second birth;
The earthquake is not satisfied at once.  

The following poem, ‘The Kind Ghosts’ by Wilfred Owen, perpetuates this image of the cyclical nature of violence, by bringing us from the French Revolution up to the First World War.  Here Britain (embodied by a woman asleep in a beautiful house) is condemned for being able to sleep, in wilful ignorance of the devastation she has wrought on her youth.  Her peaceful sleep and beautiful abode is built, quite literally, on the destruction of a generation:

She sleeps on soft, last breaths; but no ghost looms
Out of the stillness of her palace wall,
Her wall of boys on boys and dooms on dooms.

Here sleep is condemned, and whilst the young ghosts, are prematurely forced to ‘sleep’ eternally, it should be Britain, like Macbeth, who can ‘sleep no more’.  The  Wordsworth and the Owen provide the emotional centre to the Nocturne, and are a prefiguring of Britten’s War Requiem in 1963, in which he returned to Owen alongside the liturgical mass for a larger scale and equally chilling indictment of war.  Britten was inspired by Arthur Bliss’ much neglected piece Mourning Heroes, a ‘war symphony’ written in 1930, pioneering the use of disparate texts by various poets in one work, put together to explore the theme of heroism.  The Nocturne owes much to this original war work, particularly Bliss’ setting of Owen’s ‘Spring Offensive’, invoking the soundscape of the trenches with a “fearsome array” of timpani, with remarkable similarity to the solo timpani part that characterises the Wordsworth setting here.

Both Britten and Bliss before him recognised that one of the principal achievements of a cycle is that some kind of emotional or narrative progression has taken place by the end.  This can be charted by the emotional high points of the work.  The first is the desperate scream ‘sleep no more!’ in the Wordsworth.  The second climax is towards the end of the final song, illustrating the words ‘through heavy sleep’ in Shakespeare’s ‘Sonnet 43’.  Here the singer is arguing that sleep brings visions of the loved one that are fair but imperfect, therefore whilst sleep is something to be desired, it would be far better if the adored could be seen in full glory in the day.  Here, the insomnia of the Wordsworth has been replaced by a welcoming of sleep, but sleep itself has served its purpose;  the poet who opened the cycle asleep is ready to wake now.  An emotional journey has taken place, and both night and the cycle are ended. 

Tonight’s programme is in itself a kind of cycle – a series of musical investigations of sleep.  The concert opens with a fanfare by Stravinsky.  Trumpets are the announcers of beginnings and ends; heralding the dawn, but also marking the beginning of night with the ‘last post’.  In this instance, the trumpets lead us into night; a watchman imploring the gods for ‘a blessed end to all our pain’ in Birtwistle’s setting of the prologue of Agamemnon, from Aeschylus’ trilogy the Oresteia (written in 458 BC).  The Oresteia begins in literal darkness, and the darkness of moral confusion, ambiguity, hatred and revenge continue to be worked out throughout the trilogy.  It concerns the end of the curse on the royal household of Atreus; the old men of the chorus in their opening chant ‘Hymn to Zeus’ declare that suffering must be experienced before man can be released from ceaseless bloodshed. They declare that it is a law laid down by Zeus:

That we must suffer, suffer into truth.
We cannot sleep, and drop by drop at the heart
 the pain of pain remembered comes again,
and we resist, but ripeness comes as well.

This is a period of mental darkness (and significantly, sleeplessness), which reason, law and morality lift at the end, when a metaphorical new dawn is ushered in with the birth of democracy.

Handel’s famous oratorio depicts the story of Samson. Betrayed (in Milton’s version) by his wife Delila, Samson is blind and a slave, existing quite literally in darkness. The two arias are put together here as a pair to move from total darkness to dawn: ‘Total eclipse’ followed by sunrise in ‘Thus when the sun from’s wat’ry bed’, mirroring in microcosm the progression that takes place in Britten’s Nocturne.  

Both John Woolrich’s Ulysses Awakes and Britten’s Lachrymae for viola and orchestra take earlier musical works as inspiration for an exploration of darkness, melancholy and eventual light.  Woolrich uses Monteverdi, and Britten uses John Dowland.  This technique of using another’s work as the springboard for inspiration is similar to the use of text to provide structure and theme – in these two pieces Britten and Woolrich are exploring others’ music with their own compositions, in Nocturne Britten is exploring poets’ texts with his music; augmenting them, casting them in different terms and putting poems side by side to shed new light on them.  

The relation of music to poetry has been described (by C18th opera composer Christoph Gluck, for instance) as much the same as that of harmonious colouring and well-disposed light and shade to an accurate drawing, which animates the figures without altering their outlines. But Nocturne represents far more than mere augmentation of poetry by musical highlighting; Britten’s setting of the poems he chooses is a complex act of interpreting the texts – almost a kind of literary criticism, as well as a creative work in its own right.

©Kate Kennedy, 2008

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