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Review
Different though they are, putting Britten s three big foreign-language song cycles with piano on a single disc makes obvious sense. The tenor Mark Padmore opens with an impassioned, vibrantly coloured performance of the earliest of them, the 1940 Seven Sonnets of Michelangelo, in which Britten s musical language and emotions seem set free. He rightly takes a more reflective approach in the Sechs Hölderlin-Fragmente (1958), songs in which the issues of mortality, lost innocence and self-doubt are addressed. The Pushkin settings of The Poet s Echo (1965) demand dramatic, intense colours, and the soprano Susan Gritton duly supplies them. Between cycles, eight beguilingly sung arrangements of French folk songs are shared by the two singers. Throughout, the pianist Iain Burnside traverses this vast, impressive terrain with stylish ease. --Stephen Pettitt,The Sunday Times,May 4, 2008
Review
Under the title Britten Abroad, this beautifully conceived and vividly performed collection brings together all the songs Benjamin Britten composed to non-English texts. It's dominated by three of the less well-known song cycles. The Michelangelo Sonnets from 1940 was Britten's first work explicitly composed for Peter Pears and contains some of the most passionately personal music he ever produced; the Hölderlin Fragments were also written for the tenor, in 1958, while the Pushkin settings of The Poet's Echo date from 1965 and were dedicated to the soprano Galina Vishnevskaya and her husband Mstislav Rostropovich. Alongside those are some French folksong arrangements, and Britten's only Goethe setting, the weirdly meditative Um Mitternacht, from 1960. Tenor Mark Padmore takes the Michelangelo cycle by the throat, and wrings out of it a powerfully eloquent performance, and he's equally persuasive in the Hölderlin settings, while soprano Susan Gritton does not attempt the histrionics that Vishnevskaya brought to the Pushkin songs, but invests them instead with genuinely credible dramatic intensity. Iain Burnside is a model accompanist. An outstanding disc --Andrew Clements, The Guardian, Friday May 30, 2008
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What Do Customers Ultimately Buy After Viewing This Item?
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79% buy the item featured on this page: Britten Abroad (Susan Gritton/Mark Padmore/Iain Burnside)£13.69 |
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19% buy Britten: Before Life & After (Mark Padmore/Roger Vignoles)£10.98 |
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2% buy BRITTEN: Serenade for Tenor, Horn & Strings; Les Illuminations; Nocturne £4.78 |
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