Britten: Serenade for Tenor, Horn and Strings; Seven Sonnets of Michelangelo; Winter Words

 

 

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After all, it says `Historic' quite clearly on the cover. Each of the three works on the disc were conceived as lapidary settings for the jewel of Peter Pears voice.

I have loved the Serenade for Tenor, Horn and Strings, Op.32 (1942) since misty eyed adolescence, and it was a spur to a wider exploration of poetry than that which schooling alone would have endowed me with. Though I own several versions of this marvellous work, its universal essence makes it hard for any one to be superior. Nonetheless, with this first recording by Pears, Britten, and the brilliant horn player, Dennis Brain, you cannot help but know that you are listening to a piece of musical history. Despite the primitive recording quality we sense the audacity of what they were attempting shining through the hiss and crackle. The dramatic core of the work is the jet black Elegy made from Blake's Sick Rose. About these are grouped as wide a range of nocturnal moods as you could hope to assemble. To one side the heart melting 17th Century Pastoral sunset of Charles Cotton, followed by Tennyson's, so very English fairy-tale Nocturne. To the other, the leaden mood is stoked to hellish nightmare by the anonymous Dirge, itself lifted miraculously by Ben Jonson's sparkling Hymn to Cynthia, Goddess of the Moon. The whole is bought to its eerily beautiful climax, a morphia induced slumber made from Keats' glorious Sonnet, To Sleep. Just to say the words, `O soft embalmer of the still midnight' aloud brings a lump to my throat. This whole is then wrapped between two deceptively slow and simple horn solos from Brain, at start and end, actually involving a difficult sequence of harmonics from which to get an even tone is rather hard. Each iteration of the solo is the same, but the last is played off stage to suggest a receding into night and sleep.

There is a quality of eroticism that emerges from time to time in Britten that cannot be heard in the work of any other composer. A galvanic, lump in the throat eroticism that might seem specifically homoerotic, simply because Britten deploys it in homoerotic contexts. But perhaps it is because this quality is a mite vain, a tad precious and tinged with just the smallest hint of cruelty. This eroticism turns up in numerous places; Les Illuminations (gracieaux fils du Pan), Death in Venice, and in the very beautiful Seven Sonnets of Michelangelo, Op.22 (1940), written for and sung on this disc by Britten's lifetime partner, Peter Pears. Though the texts of all seven sonnets deal with themes of love spurned, forbidden or undeclared, only the music for the last of them directly reflects the pain of yearning and heartbreak expressed in the words. For the previous six the music is bright, light and gay, entirely at odds with their text, thereby conveying a sophisticated irony, and the private nobility of a world of pain accepted, that has had to serve as solace to the outcast down all the centuries. It is in the third and, to a lesser extent, the fourth and fifth of the sonnets that the erotic quality mentioned is made explicit, but their effect is so central and powerful as to imbue the impression of the whole cycle with that same charged feeling. Is it necessary to add that I myself am not gay, but am moved by the predicament of those that are, who have found themselves imprisoned within intolerant cultures? Probably not.

The eight songs, Winter Words, Op.52 (1953), are settings of poems by Thomas Hardy. All but the last strive to capture small incidents from daily life from which wider morals and human messages may then be drawn. Thus, a baby observes that a wagtail has fear for no other creatures than man. Ruminations on the life's journey of a small boy asleep, travelling alone on a train, his innocence so perilously fragile, journeying now from where to where? The failure of callous clergy to honour the last request of a dutiful country choirmaster for music at his funeral, a particularly poignant one. And so on. Only the final song, which is also the most beautifully wrought, is of a more general significance. It tells us of `A time there was' before the evolution of consciousness, when there was no pain or fear. The song build to an impassioned pleading to know `how long ere nescience', that is ignorance `be reaffirmed. About as beautiful a restatement that `ignorance is bliss' as one might try for.

This has to be the essential recording. Given you have to put up with the ropey sound quality. It sounds as if it were mastered on scratched vinyl but then the recordings are old: "Serenade" was recorded in 1944, "Michelangelo Sonnets" and "Winter Words" in 1954. The defects somehow add to the overall effect. More recent recordings don't have the same emotional power. Here you have Peter Pears and Dennis Brain conducted by Britten himself. Unfortunately copies are getting increasingly rare hence the soaring price. However, if you love Britten this is recording is the one you should not live without.

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