U.S. Hears Best of Britten

During the UK/LA Festival, we are being given ample opportunity to savor some of the finest British music of this century, with several recording companies (inadvertently, it must be assumed) playing along with an extraordinary number of releases in the same vein. For example: The career of Benjamin Britten is, with the exception of his operas, spread out before us in glorious profusion on no less than a dozen new compact discs.

In 1937, Britten, then 24 years old, made his mark outside England with the premiere at the Salzburg Festival of his Variations on a Theme of Frank Bridge, a work of stunning brilliance with its sumptuous melodies and catchy rhythms embedded in an exhaustive catalogue of string-orchestra techniques and sonorities.

The piece requires execution of considerable ensemble virtuosity and a conductor of surpassing alertness--elements present in the exceptionally fine interpretation by the strings of the Northern Sinfonia of England under Richard Hickox’s direction (ASV 591).

The same cannot be said for a pair of sloppily executed, sluggishly led versions of the same work by the English String Orchestra conducted by William Boughton (Nimbus 5025) and the Toulouse Chamber Orchestra directed by Bojidar Bratoev (Auvidis 6124).

Each of the three performances comes as part of an all-Britten program. Hickox and Boughton both give us the clever if cutesy and rather overexposed “Simple Symphony” by an even younger composer, and the sinewy Prelude and Fugue for strings written during World War II. Both sets of interpretations follow the general course set in the Bridge Variations, Hickox’s being models of their kind, Boughton’s mediocre at best.

The Nimbus program and that on Auvidis (a French label new to this country) find common ground with the darkly magnificent “Lachrymae, Reflections on a Song of Dowland” (the song being “If my complaints could passion move”) in its 1976 scoring for solo viola and strings. Both versions are excellent, the work being very much the violist’s show. Roger Best is the soloist on Nimbus, Gerard Causse for Auvidis.

The French label further includes a meretricious, uncredited string-orchestra arrangement of the massive final “Chacony” from Britten’s String Quartet No. 2 (1945). The original version of that entire work, one of the composer’s masterpieces, is superbly played by the Endellion String Quartet, a young British ensemble previously unknown to this listener, in combination with the composer’s swan-song, his Third Quartet, completed two weeks before his death in 1976 for the Amadeus Quartet and based on themes from his last opera, “Death in Venice.”

As recorded by the Amadeus in 1976, and performed by them in Los Angeles shortly thereafter, the Third Quartet seemed unnecessarily dour and at times incoherent. As performed by the Endellion Quartet (on Angel 47696)--with far greater technical control than the Amadeus--it makes profound, moving sense, above all in the dark cantilena of the central C-major movement. Splendid stuff.

And Angel/EMI doesn’t leave it at that: they give us a huge portion of Britten’s earlier music involving the quartet of strings and portions thereof--compositions written between 1931 and 1936, culminating in the vital, enormously attractive Quartet in D of 1936.

Again, the performances by the Endellion Quartet (on Angel 47694 and 47695) are first-rate in all respects.

Britten’s last major vocal work, “Phaedra” (1976), and one of his earliest, “Les Illuminations” (1939), are coupled on yet another Angel compact disc (49259).

“Phaedra” has heretofore been the exclusive property of its dedicatee, Janet Baker. On this new issue, mezzo-soprano Felicity Palmer delivers Robert Lowell’s texts (after Racine) with splendid dramatic thrust, but falls short of Baker’s secure vocalism in the original London recording, which awaits compact disc reissue.

“Les Illuminations,” French-language settings of poems by Rimbaud, is sung with admirable brio and strength of line by soprano Jill Gomez, a welcome change from the usual tenor performance and wholly in keeping with the composer’s original designation of the work for high voice.

Both singers are expertly supported by a chamber orchestra called the Endymion Ensemble under the incisive direction of one John Whitfield. Good people, whoever they may be.

The 1943 Serenade for Tenor, Horn and Strings, still the grandest of Britten’s non-operatic vocal works, is projected by the American tenor Grayson Hirst with a solidity of tone that its original executant, Peter Pears, probably could never have achieved. Hirst is also able to deliver the texts by various English poets with hardly less clarity and impact than Pears did. He does not, however, have the advantage of Barry Tuckwell’s horn playing and the composer’s conducting in the Pears recording recently reissued in compact disc format.

Hirst’s colleagues, hornist L. William Kuyper and Kenneth Klein, who conducts something lumpily dubbed the New York Virtuosi Chamber Symphony, are proficient but somewhat on the stiff side. Still, the program, which also includes Vaughan Williams’ “Serenade to Music,” in its original version for 16 solo singers, and Elgar’s Serenade for Strings, is undeniably appealing (Vox Cum Laude 10055).