Britten's Century

Britten's Century
Author: Mark Bostridge
Publisher: A&C Black
Total Pages: 202
Release: 2013-06-20
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN: 1441151869

2013 marks the centenary of the birth of Benjamin Britten. Here is an outstanding collection of essays to mark the event. Britten's Century considers various aspects of Britten's life and work. The book is written by biographers, performers and music critics. Here is a wealth of subject matter - Britten's operatic output, his orchestral works, his contribution to the revival of English song. Biographically, this book moves on beyond the relationship with Peter Pears and the salacious speculation about his infatuation with various boys, to a consideration of Britten's experience as a homosexual man living in a largely homophobic society. Another area here which is often overlooked is the view of Britten from outside the British Isles - the USA and Italy, where his operas have long been extremely popular.

Knowing Britten

Knowing Britten
Author: Steuart Bedford
Publisher: Boydell Press
Total Pages: 0
Release: 2021
Genre: Composers
ISBN: 9780957167223

Knowing Britten is a vivid and insightful account of Steuart Bedford's long association with both Britten the man and his music The conductor and pianist Steuart Bedford (199-2021) could not remember a time when he did not know Benjamin Britten. His mother, Lesley Duff, sang with the English Opera Group in the premieres of The Rape of Lucretia and Albert Herrring in the late 1940s, and the family was closely involved with Britten and Pears for many years. Following his music studies and time on the music staff at Glyndebourne, Bedford joined the English Opera Group, gradually becoming Britten's trusted surrogate conductor. As Britten's health began to fail, Before took on responsibility for the premiere of Death in Venice, including its US premiere at the Metropolitan Opera, New York, and the dramatic cantata Phaedra among others.

Britten and the Far East

Britten and the Far East
Author: Mervyn Cooke
Publisher: Boydell & Brewer
Total Pages: 310
Release: 1998
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 9780851158303

Investigation into the influence of Eastern music on Britten's composition. Benjamin Britten's interest in the musical traditions of the Far East had a far-reaching influence on his compositional style; this book is the first to investigate the highly original cross-cultural synthesis he was able to achieve through the use of material borrowed from Balinese, Japanese and Indian music. Britten's visit to Indonesia and Japan in 1955-6 is reconstructed from archival sources, and shown to have had a profound impact on his subsequent work: the techniques of Balinese gamelan music were used in the ballet The Prince of the Pagodas (1957), and then became an essential feature of Britten's compositional style, at their most potent in Death in Venice(1973). The No drama and Gagaku court music of Japan were the inspiration for the trilogy of church parables Britten composed in the 1960s. The precise nature of these influences is discussed; Britten's sporadic borrowings from Indian music are also fully analysed. There is a survey of critical responses to Britten's cross-cultural experiments. Dr MERVYN COOKE lectures in music at the University of Nottingham.

Rethinking Britten

Rethinking Britten
Author: Philip Rupprecht
Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA
Total Pages: 345
Release: 2013-09-19
Genre: History
ISBN: 0199794812

This book offers a new account of the composer's enduring popularity. 12 essays by a group of leading senior and emerging scholars offer fresh historical and interpretive contexts for all phases of Britten's career.

Benjamin Britten Studies

Benjamin Britten Studies
Author: Vicki P. Stroeher
Publisher: Boydell & Brewer
Total Pages: 556
Release: 2017
Genre: Music
ISBN: 1783271957

The shock of exile / Paul Kildea -- Britten, Paul Bunyan, and American-ness / Vicki P. Stroeher -- Collaborating with Corwin, CBS, and the BBC / Jenny Doctor -- An empire built on shingle / Justin Vickers -- Save me from those suffering boys / Byron Adams -- Britten's (and Pears's) Beloved / Louis Niebur -- Notes of unbelonging / Lloyd Whitesell -- Take these tokens that you may feel us near / Colleen Renihan -- Traces of Nō / Kevin Salfen -- Britten and the augmented sixth / Christopher Mark -- Quickenings of the heart / Philip Rupprecht -- Reviving Paul Bunyan / Danielle Ward-Griffin -- Striking a compromise / Thornton Miller -- From Boosey & Hawkes to Faber Music / Nicholas Clark -- The man himself / Lucy Walker -- Epilogue / Vicki P. Stroeher and Justin Vickers

Sea-changes: Melville - Forster - Britten

Sea-changes: Melville - Forster - Britten
Author: Hanna Rochlitz
Publisher: Universitätsverlag Göttingen
Total Pages: 597
Release: 2012
Genre: Music
ISBN: 3863950453

E. M. Forster first encountered Billy Budd in 1926. Some twenty years later, he embarked on a collaboration with Benjamin Britten and Eric Crozier, adapting Melville’s novella for the opera stage. The libretto they produced poignantly reaffirmsthe Forsterian creed of salvation through personal relationships.This study presents an extensive exploration of Forster’s involvement in the interpretation, transformation and re-creation of Melville’s text. It situates the story of the Handsome Sailor in the wider context of Forster’s literary oeuvre, his life, and his lifewritings. In detailed readings, Billy Budd becomes a lens through which the themes, patterns and leitmotifs of Forsterian thought and creative imagination are brought into focus. A close re-examination of the libretto sketches serves to shed new light on the collaborative process in which Melville’s story was changed to fit an archetypal array of plot and character types that is central to Forster’s own storytelling.

Knowing When to Stop

Knowing When to Stop
Author: Ned Rorem
Publisher: Open Road Media
Total Pages: 677
Release: 2013-06-18
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN: 1480427756

DIVDIVA thrilling, poignant, and bold memoir of the early years and accomplishments—both musical and sexual—of renowned contemporary composer Ned Rorem/divDIV Ned Rorem, arguably the greatest composer of art songs that America has produced in more than a hundred years, is also revered as a diarist and essayist whose unexpurgated writings are at once enthralling, enlightening, and provocative. In Knowing When to Stop, one of the most creative American artists of our time offers readers a colorful narrative of his first twenty-seven years, expertly unraveling the intriguing conundrum of who he truly is and how he came to be that way./divDIV /divDIVAs the author himself writes, “A memoir is not a diary. Diaries are written in the heat of battle, memoirs in the repose of retrospect.” But careful thought and consideration have not dulled the sharp point of Rorem’s pen as he writes openly of his life and loves, his missteps and triumphs, and offers frank and fascinating portraits of the luminaries in his circle: Aaron Copland, Truman Capote, Jean Cocteau, Martha Graham, Igor Stravinsky, Billie Holliday, Paul Bowles, and Alfred C. Kinsey, to name a few. The result is an early life story that is riveting, moving, and intimate—a magnificent self-portrait of one of the great minds of this age. /div/div

Britten and Barber

Britten and Barber
Author: Daniel Felsenfeld
Publisher: Hal Leonard Corporation
Total Pages: 196
Release: 2005
Genre: Music
ISBN: 9781574671087

(Amadeus). The second title in the Amadeus Press Parallel Lives series, this volume examines the lives and work of two giants of 20th century music. Both composers influenced countless others, and their works are performed often in today's concert and opera houses. Felsenfeld gives us a penetrating look into the lives of these two extraordinary men, helping us get to know them and therefore better understand their music. In clear, concise language he examines their major works, helping us to understand their genius and power, which is illustrated by the accompanying full-length CD. The author points out parallel developments in Britten and Barber's lives and careers. Both came of age in a time of war, a time of political and artistic unrest and upheaval, and both were celebrities in their own time. Both wrote primarily and most successfully for the voice, but neither became ghettoized as a strictly vocal composer, and both were possessed of a flawless compositional technique, with a fluency that bordered on wizardry. Finally, both were prolific, involved musical presences on the world stage. The accompanying full-length CD from Naxos Records includes six complete pieces.

On Mahler and Britten

On Mahler and Britten
Author: Philip Reed
Publisher: Boydell & Brewer
Total Pages: 380
Release: 1995
Genre: Music
ISBN: 9780851156149

In February 1995 Donald Mitchell, the foremost authority on the life and works of Gustav Mahler and Benjamin Britten, celebrated his seventieth birthday. To mark this event, the present Festschrift has been compiled under the editorship of Philip Reed. Distinguished composers, scholars, colleagues and friends from around the world have written on aspects of the two composers closest to Mitchell's heart - Mahler and Britten - to produce a volume which not only reflects some of the latest thinking on this pair of remarkable figures in the music of our century, but which also pays full tribute to the impact of Mitchell's own work on these composers over the last fifty years. The volume includes the fullest bibliography of Mitchell's writings yet compiled.

Benjamin Britten in Context

Benjamin Britten in Context
Author: Vicki P Stroeher
Publisher: Composers in Context
Total Pages: 427
Release: 2022-04-21
Genre: Music
ISBN: 1108496695

A thematically organised overview of the musical, social and cultural contexts for the multi-faceted career of this pivotal British composer.