Britten’s Century: Celebrating 100 Years of Britten edited by Mark Bostridge
For my current studies, I’m mostly reading books about twentieth-century composer Benjamin Britten. This week I finished Britten’s Century, a collection of essays about the composer by musicians and scholars, published for the Britten centenary (2013). The book offers bite-sized insights on the composer, perfect for learning a little about one aspect of Britten’s life or music. Of particular interest to me are contributions from Roger Vignoles (repetiteur) and Dame Janet Baker (mezzo soprano).
In London, I participated in classes led by Vignoles, during which I worked on song repertoire and benefited from his expert feedback and advice. Having performed and recorded a large portion of the art-song repertoire with the world’s finest singers, Vignoles possesses an encyclopedic and unsurpassed knowledge of vocal music. Accordingly, his insights on Britten are profound, and eloquently expressed. Vignoles hasn’t published many writings during the course of his outstanding career as repetiteur, and so his chapter ‘A Dancer Before God: Britten’s Five Canticles’ gives a small, fascinating glimpse into his approach to interpreting and performing Britten’s Canticles.
Dame Janet Baker’s offering, ‘Working with Britten’, is similarly interesting. Britten composed Phaedra for the singer during the final years of his life, and Baker performed the cantata for the 1976 Aldeburgh Festival – the last at which Britten was present. Baker is among the only surviving musicians for whom Britten composed music, making her recollections (almost forty years after the premiere of Phaedra) all the more valuable. Baker’s writing is sharp and evocative, giving a real sense of what it was like to collaborate with one of the greatest composers of the twentieth-century.
Of all the many books and articles on Britten I’ve read this year, Britten’s Century stands out for its unique contributions from performers, not just scholars and biographers, adding an interesting dimension to the already extensive scholarship on the composer.