Another archive treasure mined from the catacombs of Broadcasting House comes blinking into the sunlight. A reminder, on this occasion, of the old Aldeburgh where the concert hall became a drawing-room peopled with genius and we, the far-flung radio audience, eavesdropped for a precious hour or so in the privacy of our own rooms. The programme is odd, but a joy: the product of taste and knowledge, and a profound pleasure in music-making.
First, Brahms’s Liebeslieder with Claudio Arrau, no less, partnering Britten at the keyboard. It had not been planned as such; cancellations had caused the hosts to shuffle the musical house guests. The result is a performance of great strength and spontaneity, the two pianists – the engine-room of this thoroughly ‘instrumental’ work – playing with a singleness and singularity of spirit that takes the breath away. Brahms occasionally allows solo voices to shine: the alto in ‘Wohl schon bewandt’, the tenor in ‘Nicht wandle, mein Licht’ and again in the one Liebeslied that has achieved universal popularity, ‘Ein kleiner, hubscher Vogel’. Here the tones of Baker and Pears shine characteristically through. In the end, though, it is (as it should be) the power and charm of the whole ensemble that provides the pleasure. This hasn’t, of course, the echt-wienerisch charm of the 1947 EMI set listed above; Arrau was not that kind of pianist. But there is nothing burdensome here. How wonderful to have real Brahmsian fierceness in ‘Nein, es ist nicht auszukommen’ yet to have so easeful a performance of ‘Wenn so lind dein Auge’ and such charm and wit in ‘Am Donaustrande’, Brahms’s sideways glance at Strauss’s Blue Danube which he so coveted and admired.
The Tchaikovsky songs, four of the six duets, Op. 46 he wrote for his niece, Tatyana Davidova, are sung in English and are thus as accessible as ‘Come into the garden, Maud’. Heather Harper and Dame Janet Baker, accompanied by Britten, sing them grandly, without inhibition, but it is the piano writing that tends to catch the imagination. ‘Evening’ is memorable for the piano’s proto-Delian landscape painting; ‘Tears’ has an unexpectedly lengthy and affecting postlude. That said, the final song in the group, ‘Dawn’, brings voices and piano together in the happiest of conjunctions, the verses of Tchaikovsky’s recently deceased friend, the post-dilettante Ivan Surikov, sounding especially well in English.
Finally, there is Rossini, four of Les soirees musicales. Should the singing be quite so declamatory? Perhaps not, until one realizes just how grand and funny something like the performance of ‘La partenza’ really is; Baker imperiously parodying the heroic style, Britten’s playing of the 22-second postlude a model of enigmatic humour. At one level, this, and the performance of ‘La regata veneziana’ which concludes the programme, are high parody: Britten the composer of Albert Herring (which Rossini would have loved) rather than Britten the alert arranger of Rossiniana in Matinees and Soirees musicales which the great man would barely have glanced at.
It is in the mordant postlude to ‘La partenza’, however, that we have ‘Essence de Rossini’ distilled to a recipe of the composer’s own making by Britten himself in another of those acts of musical empathy which made him one of the wonders of the musical world.'