Search - Benjamin Britten, Graham Johnson, Anthony Rolfe Johnson :: Britten: Songs

Excellent introduction to the many facets of Britten's work

darragh o'donoghue | 10/16/2001

(4 out of 5 stars)

"This disc comprises two song cycles, four settings of folk-songs, and a Purcell-inspired canticle. It lays bear the schizophrenic character of the composer's work. For someone used to a starker Britten, the 'Seven Sonnets of Michaelangelo' came as a shock, piano full of rich, warm colour; the voice as often exultant and ecstatic as yearning or despairing. The canticle 'My beloved is mine' is equally strange, the rhapsodies to God in the text sound like a glorious hymn to gay desire, with ambivalent music to match.The second half is, by contrast, a bleak affair. The unadorned folk settings make melancholy texts even sadder, with the tinkling piano to the tragedy of 'Little Sir William' grotesquely inappropriate. The 'Winter Words' cycle is the finest musical evocation we have of Thomas Hardy - both captring the general atmosphere and feelings we associate with the writer; and offering rich commentary on the individual poems, with their characteristic tales of passing time, unforgiving milieux, missed opportunities and the omnipresent shadow of death. The haunting 'Choirmaster's Burial', in which the title character is denied the burial he wants, only for ghosts to play at his funeral, is one of the greatest songs in any language.These works were written for Britten's lover Peter Pears, and the Michealangelo sonnets especially speak of the most profound and rapturous personal love, so it is to Anthony Rolfe Johnson's credit that he finds his own voice in this material, helped immeasurably by the emotional intelligence of his accompanist, the peerless Graham Johnson."