Britten Choral Works

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Record and Artist Details

Composer or Director: Benjamin Britten

Label: Classics

Magazine Review Date: 10/1988

Media Format: CD or Download

Media Runtime: 64

Mastering:

DDD

Catalogue Number: 790728-2

Tracks:

Composition	Artist Credit
(A) Boy is Born choral variations on old carols	Benjamin Britten, Composer Benjamin Britten, Composer London Sinfonietta Chorus St Paul's Cathedral Choir (Boys' Voices) Terry Edwards, Conductor
Hymn to St Cecilia	Benjamin Britten, Composer Benjamin Britten, Composer London Sinfonietta Voices Terry Edwards, Conductor
A.M.D.G.	Benjamin Britten, Composer Benjamin Britten, Composer London Sinfonietta Chorus London Sinfonietta Voices St Paul's Cathedral Choir (Boys' Voices) Terry Edwards, Conductor
(A) Shepherd's Carol	Benjamin Britten, Composer Benjamin Britten, Composer London Sinfonietta Chorus Terry Edwards, Conductor

Composer or Director: Benjamin Britten

Label: Classics

Magazine Review Date: 10/1988

Media Format: Vinyl

Media Runtime: 0

Mastering:

DDD

Catalogue Number: 790728-1

Tracks:

Composition	Artist Credit
(A) Boy is Born choral variations on old carols	Benjamin Britten, Composer Benjamin Britten, Composer London Sinfonietta Chorus St Paul's Cathedral Choir (Boys' Voices) Terry Edwards, Conductor
Hymn to St Cecilia	Benjamin Britten, Composer Benjamin Britten, Composer London Sinfonietta Voices Terry Edwards, Conductor
A.M.D.G.	Benjamin Britten, Composer Benjamin Britten, Composer London Sinfonietta Chorus London Sinfonietta Voices St Paul's Cathedral Choir (Boys' Voices) Terry Edwards, Conductor
(A) Shepherd's Carol	Benjamin Britten, Composer Benjamin Britten, Composer London Sinfonietta Chorus Terry Edwards, Conductor

Composer or Director: Benjamin Britten

Label: Classics

Magazine Review Date: 10/1988

Media Format: Cassette

Media Runtime: 0

Mastering:

DDD

Catalogue Number: 790728-4

Tracks:

Composition	Artist Credit
(A) Boy is Born choral variations on old carols	Benjamin Britten, Composer Benjamin Britten, Composer London Sinfonietta Chorus St Paul's Cathedral Choir (Boys' Voices) Terry Edwards, Conductor
Hymn to St Cecilia	Benjamin Britten, Composer Benjamin Britten, Composer London Sinfonietta Voices Terry Edwards, Conductor
A.M.D.G.	Benjamin Britten, Composer Benjamin Britten, Composer London Sinfonietta Chorus London Sinfonietta Voices St Paul's Cathedral Choir (Boys' Voices) Terry Edwards, Conductor
(A) Shepherd's Carol	Benjamin Britten, Composer Benjamin Britten, Composer London Sinfonietta Chorus Terry Edwards, Conductor

Author:

This is an important issue, and first let me praise the enthrallingly good singing of the London Sinfonietta Voices and Chorus and the magnificent recording quality. The recording of unaccompanied voices often presents special problems of balance and distortion, but here they seem to me to have been solved.
Of the four Britten works on this disc, the novelty is A. M. D. G., settings of seven poems by Gerard Manley Hopkins which Britten sketched in 1939 for Peter Pears's Elizabethan Singers. They were laid aside while he was in America and have been resurrected since his death by his executors. They are sung here in a putative order, since Britten had not established a final order, and we are not told who has edited the ''somewhat unfinished state of the manuscript'' for performance, though one presumes it may have been Colin Matthews. However, it is a job well done and worth doing, for it has restored to us a major Britten work.
All Britten's fertile inventiveness of the 1939–49 period is here at its most prolific. There is an extraordinary setting of ''O Deus, ego amo te'', leaping with erotic religious fervour, in ''Rosa mystica'' the woman's voices first have the text and the melody against the chanting of the men- in ''The Soldier'' it is easy to recognize the future composer of War Requiem, for it is in the jaunty, mocking vein of some of the Owen settings; and ''God's Grandeur'' is a savagely exciting example of Britten at his most virtuosic. This is all the more significant because the record begins with his A Boy was Born, written when he was 19 and still perhaps, his most challenging, advanced and difficult choral work—original, too, in its use of variation form with a different medieval carol for each variation.
Then there is the Hymn to St Cecilia, well loved and well known, but now we can hear what we could not know before 1976—that it is closely related to Paul Bunyan on which he had collaborated with Auden a few months earlier. It is sung here (as Britten said it could be) by five solo voices, and very effective it is. Whatever difficulties he found in setting Auden, there is no doubt—as the piquant Shepherd's Carol also shows—that this poet drew an insouciant lyrical vein from Britten which he never wholly recaptured after their collaboration ceased. For all who love Britten's music, this recording is indispensable.'