Britten chafed at his concert engagements and suffered dreadfully from nerves on the day of performance. He nevertheless played and conducted with a distinction that would have secured him a special place in the musical world even if he had not written a note. The refinement of touch and taste was evident whenever he played the piano, and his conducting combined a feeling for style with a professional competence not always found when composers take up the baton. There is still no doubt that his status as a composer – known simply, by the time these concerts took place, as ‘Britten’ – added greatly to the sense of occasion. One is aware of it progressively throughout Handel’s Ode for St Cecilia’s Day: opening with flair and vitality, it grows in wonder as one inspired movement follows another, and ends with something very like the shared exuberance of a great banquet, Britten in the midst.
‘Britten the Performer’ is the title of the BBC series, but these two issues focus almost equally upon Pears. His tenor recitative introduces the Ode, and his solos exploit the remarkable range of tone and volume he possessed at this time: those who think of him as essentially the exponent of a silvery and subtle spirituality may be surprised by the full-bodied tone and vigorous style he commands in ‘The trumpet’s loud clangor’. The more characteristic refinement of sensibility invests the soloist’s phrases in the suite of choral dances from Gloriana. And then in the second recording, the song recital, Pears is Britten’s equal partner, rendered more than equal in one respect by the balance between voice and piano as recorded in the concert of 1958. This opens with three songs by Schubert, Nachtviolen being affectionately sung with a use of the head-voice that recalls, from an earlier generation, the other-worldly tone of Karl Erb. In the Liederkreis the special identity of each song in turn is captured with mental dexterity as well as musical skill (the last three songs, for instance, have Pears with ominously darkened voice for ‘Zwielicht’, buoyancy and shuddering disquiet in ‘Im Walde’ and then a rapt, inspired excitement in ‘Fruhlingsnacht’).
These are all good to have, and important additions to the Britten-Pears record-library; but, frankly, the greatest enjoyment lies in the English songs, taken from the Aldeburgh recital of a year later, and much better in balance. The Purcell group has such a sure feeling for shades and rhythms, and though the folk-songs have been performed by the pair countless times it cannot have been on many happier occasions than this. Pears was a great charmer when he wanted to be, and in Man is for the woman made and Salley in our alley the audience’s delight is infectious.
Britten of course worked with a host of gifted musicians. The list of instrumental soloists in Handel – Keith Harvey, Richard Adeney, Philip Jones, Julian Bream and Philip Ledger – itself reads like a catalogue of St Cecilia’s sons. Heather Harper’s contribution too is outstanding: her first aria, ‘From harmony’, is utterly lovely. The series is well edited, with valuable notes here by (respectively) Marion Thorpe and Roger Vignoles, though the absence of texts is regrettable, especially of the Faure. The remastering has no doubt been conscientiously done, but, even though Dryden does refer to ‘sharp violins’, I find their tone as recorded in the Handel disagreeably acidic.'