Once thought too continental by half (he liked Berg's music!), Britten lived to see himself become a pillar of the English musical establishment, scorned by younger men who thought his music irrelevant in a post-Webernian world. That particular cultural revolution is thankfully now as much part of history as that of Chairman Mao, and Britten's work is now performed everywhere—although I am still waiting to hear the Seven Sonnets of Michelangelo sung by an Italian tenor.
Even so, I was surprised to meet a cycle so utterly English as his Friday Afternoons, written in 1934 for the prep school where his elder brother Robert took a singing class (on Friday afternoons), performed by the Vienna Boys' Choir under the direction, from the keyboard, of a Russian pianist principally associated with the romantic repertory. Pleased too, because the style of this new performance is crisp, clean and generally idiomatic, although the timbre of these young Austrian-trained voices is more refined than that of the Downside School Boys' Choir in Britten's own 1967 recording, recently reissued at mid price. This incurs a loss of raw charm (as with the soloists in ''Cuckoo!'') and sometimes we need more vitality and pace: ''A New Year Carol'', ''I must be married on Sunday'' and—especially—the final ''Old Abram Brown'' are examples. However, the English pronunciation (save for ''Jazz'' sounding like ''Ches'' in No. 10) needs no apology.
The Golden Vanity, composed ''after the old English ballad'' as the score puts it, was written for the Vienna Boys' Choir in 1966 and first performed at Aldeburgh. The composer's suggested duration is 17 minutes; here it is over 19, and the performance could be tauter. Whilst it begins impeccably in this respect, tempo and tone ease in recitative exchanges that should remain urgent (for example the section beginning with the Vanity Captain's ''Mister Bosun, we'll try a shot!''), though never so much as to lose dramatic effectiveness. The musicianship of the singing and playing is of a high order (the heroic little Cabin-Boy is touchingly sung by Michael Matzner) and there are good sound effects of the ship's cannon. None the less, for biting authenticity I would still go to the mid-price 1969 recording with the Wandsworth School Boys' Choir, conducted by Russell Burgess, with Britten himself at the piano.
The other vocal work, The Ballad of Little Musgrave and Lady Barnard, is a Britten rarity from 1943, another ballad but this time a tale of illicit love and jealousy set for men's voices, sung with gusto by the Chorus Viennensis. The remaining 12 minutes of the disc are unusually occupied by solo piano music, with Gavrilov playing two movements from the suite, Holiday Diary; they come over well enough, although the extremely slow final ''Night'' remains as enigmatic as ever and one can't help wishing that we had been given the other two pieces as well. The recording of all this music, made last June in Vienna's Casino Zegernitz, is clear and satisfying, if on the dry side.'