It is usually suffering or catastrophe that catapults society forward and changes the way we see, hear and experience our lives. Revolutions in the arts don’t hit home with the same global impact. Benjamin Britten was a revolutionary however, who blew away the stuffy cobwebs of British musical style and irreversibly changed the concert hall and opera house experience.
It is usually suffering or catastrophe that catapults society forward and changes the way we see, hear and experience our lives. Revolutions in the arts don’t hit home with the same global impact. Benjamin Britten was a revolutionary however, who blew away the stuffy cobwebs of British musical style and irreversibly changed the concert hall and opera house experience.
In his life too he was controversial – a conscientious objector during World War Two and a social outcast because of his relationship with world renowned tenor Peter Pears, who was his muse and musical inspiration.
What a privilege it was to experience a concert in Grahamstown dedicated to this 20th century icon on Tuesday 2 October in the St Andrew’s College Drill Hall. The concert was presented by the Grahamstown Music Society.
Britten enjoyed symmetry, and so the architecture of the concert itself was cleverly designed to arch like the trajectory of a comet between two clarion calls, the first on the oboe in the Temporal Variations and the last on the horn in the Serenade.
The Temporal Variations for oboe (Hilary Mohr) and piano (Mariel Ilusorio) of 1936 is a crazy set of wartime vignettes which leave no doubt about Britten’s attitude to war. This seminal work for oboe was expertly performed by these two consummate artists.
The utterly manic fourth variation “Exercises” and the jagged edges of the bizarre “Polka”, which were reflected in the angular frown on Hilary Mohr’s face, made it quite clear that this was not a work for oboe with piano accompaniment – the tension between the two instruments was superbly realised. The ironic final variation, “Resolution”, tore at the soul with the minimalistic two-note semiquaver theme, “I am”, crying out 12 times – an emphatically doubtful affirmation.
The String Quartet of 1941 was written while Britten was living in self-imposed exile in America during the war. How apt it was to have the wonderful American cellist Caleb Vaughn-Jones performing this challenging work with Timothy Abel (viola), Duncan Samson (second violin) and Juan Munoz (first violin).
The fragile, stratospheric harmonies of the first movement were kept in orbit by the lyrical Vaughn-Jones. The second movement was a great little piece, relentless but fun. The spiritual-like Andante Comodo was welcome relief before the humorous Molto Vivace brought the work to a dazzling end.
Britten wrote the Phantasy Quartet when he was only 19, and it is a gem. Scored for oboe (Mohr), violin (Munoz), viola (Samson) and cello (Vaughn-Jones), it is like a tapestry so vividly interwoven that it takes you on a pilgrimage of emotions.
I was fortunate to attend a performance of the Shostakovich Cello Concerto in Amsterdam earlier this year. It was this work that inspired Britten to write the Cello Sonata in 1960 and Britten certainly pushed the technical boundaries of the instrument to new limits.
His Sonata is a wonderful work which was brilliantly performed by Vaughn-Jones and Ilusorio. The intuitive understanding between these two world class musicians was palpable. The pizzicato second movement was like frantic, scurrying mice who had fallen into a grain silo and couldn’t believe their luck. The distant bells of the third movement clearly personified Britten’s desperate yearning for acceptance and inner peace before the cello exploded in the finale’s tour de force.
The concert ended with a very dramatic performance of the Serenade which Britten composed in 1943 on his return to England from the USA. The influence of Aaron Copland, whom Britten had met in America, is evident in the horn Prologue and Epilogue which was performed by Boris Mohr.
Between these bookends were six exquisitely crafted songs performed by the distinguished tenor Nicholas Nicolaidis. The Pastoral evoked the aching beauty of a sunset and Ilusorio’s accompaniment was supremely sensitive.
The atmospheric but strangely restless Nocturne was followed by the bitter Elegy, “O Rose thou art sick”. The Dirge built up to a monumental climax before fading away, defeated, and one could not help but suddenly realise that we were living through the odyssey of Britten’s emotional life.
By the final song, a Keats sonnet, Nicolaidis had utterly seduced the entire audience and had us hanging on each sublime note. As the lights faded and the horn called from a distant place, we were aware that we had just experienced something truly special, and that our experience of life would somehow be richer from now on.
