LF 26: Britten – Music for Voice and Orchestra
St Mary’s Kirk, Haddington, 11/9/2026
Scottish Opera
Whether it was by design or serendipity that this concert devoted to Benjamin Britten started with Arvo Pärt’s ‘Cantus in Memoriam Benjamin Britten’ on the very day that the great Estonian composer celebrated his 91st Birthday, I know not, but it was a happy coincidence. I have met Arvo a couple of times, in Stockholm and Zurich, when I was singing Christus in performances of his masterpiece, Passio, with the Hilliard Ensemble, and just to be in the presence of this ascetic figure was exhilarating, and daunting. Like Pärt, I missed out on meeting Britten (he died in 1976, just 2 years before I started work with Peter Pears et al at Aldeburgh), but, unlike him, I failed to compose a work of genuine genius like his Cantus in Memoriam Benjamin Britten! Scored for strings and tubular bell, this great work is profound in its very simplicity, a descending A minor scale in the form of a canon starting in silence then, with a pianissimo A on the bell, running its course to a final, almost unheard, strike on the bell whose echo and reverberation end the piece.
It really is that simple but, as audiences have discovered since its premiere in 1977, it is deeply moving and conjures up all sorts of different feelings, both about loss and a sense of spirituality. With the Cantus, Pärt announced to the world that he had left his wild boy days of avant garde ghastliness behind, and had discovered a new sound, tintinnabulation, which would take the musical world by storm over the next 50 years.
The Scottish Opera Orchestra, conducted by Douglas Boyd, Artistic Director of Garsington Opera, played the Cantus with a mixture of fire and ice, perfectly setting up a concert of works for voice and orchestra by Britten himself, featuring three young soloists from the Emerging Artist Programme of Scottish Opera.
The first was the early (1940) cycle based on poems by Arthur Rimbaud, ‘Les Illuminations’. Rimbaud’s French poetry is really hard to interpret and understand, but the repeated phrase, “J’ai seul la clef de cette parade sauvage” (I alone hold the key to this savage parade), is taken to mean that the artist alone can make sense of the crazy world we live in. The young Britten (he was 27) set 9 of the 42 poems that Rimbaud wrote in England in 1873-75 when living and travelling with his lover, Paul Verlaine. Published in 1886, they are surreal long before surrealism, dealing with city life, anguish, ecstasy, metamorphosis, nature, walking, travel, creation and destruction, and must have appealed to the young English composer, setting out on his long journey to create a sound world unlike any other.
The cycle was written for soprano or tenor with string orchestra, and first performed in London in 1940, sung by Sophie Wyss, to whom it was dedicated. I must confess to only ever having heard it sung by Peter Pears in the 1963 recording conducted by the composer, so it was a new experience for me to hear it sung here by the soprano, Charlotte Jane Kennedy, one of Scottish Opera’s Emerging Artists. Ms Kennedy has a lovely voice and a good stage presence, but I missed the cutting edge necessary to stand out against a full string orchestra. Britten had perhaps not yet developed his ability to balance singer with accompaniment, and this was a shame here, as, without the surtitles, I would not have had a clue as to what Ms Kennedy was singing. St Mary’s is notoriously tricky to get the balance right, and I look forward to hearing this promising young singer in more suitable repertoire later in Scottish Opera’s season.
After the interval, during which several friends noted that the balance had been better further back in the nave, we were treated to a thrilling account of Britten’s final major work, ‘Phaedra’ which he wrote for Janet Baker in 1975, and was performed by her at the Aldeburgh Festival in the summer of 1976, only months before the composer’s death. I remember at the time being unimpressed when I first heard Dame Janet singing the cantata, feeling that this example of late Britten had lost some of the verve and brilliance of his earlier work. It was therefore with some trepidation that I sat down to listen to the mezzo-soprano, Charlotte Clapperton, sing the piece, written for mezzo and small orchestra, but my fears were completely dispelled by the excellence of the performance. This is yet another splendid British singer, rich and rounded of voice, who had no problems being heard, against an admittedly reduced orchestra, and who dominated the proceedings with a staggeringly mature reading of a tricky score. Britten wrote the words, compiled from an English translation of sections of Racine’s play, ‘Phèdre’ (1677), about the Greek wife of Theseus, who, overwhelmed by a futile passion for Theseus’s son, Hippolytus, eventually poisons herself. Not a bundle of laughs then, but a very dramatic story, told with some aplomb by Britten and interpreted well by Ms Clapperton and the orchestra, conducted by Douglas Boyd, whose dramatic urgings contributed to the success of the piece.
The final work in the programme was Britten’s very early cycle, ‘Our Hunting Fathers’, premiered in Norwich on 25th September 1936, conducted by the 23 year old composer. It is safe to say that it met with a confused reaction from audience and critics, as it did here in Haddington. Apparently, in one of the first rehearsals a week before the premiere, the orchestra lost the plot and started scurrying about squeaking during the section ‘Rats Away!’ It was only the intervention of Ralph Vaughan Williams, who happened to be in attendance, that forced the players to take the piece seriously, but it remains true that the cycle is absolutely bonkers and has remained a curiosity ever since. I had never heard it before, and I’m not sure I want to hear it again. Britten’s music has played a huge role in my career, with multiple performances all over the world, particularly of ‘Peter Grimes’ and ‘A Midsummer Night’s Dream’, and this somewhat silly work does a disservice to his memory. That is not in any way to detract from the utterly committed performance of the Canadian soprano, Avery Lafrentz, with the Scottish Opera Orchestra, and Douglas Boyd. She possesses a voice of power and quality and, as an understudy for Leonore in ‘Fidelio’ later in the season, I hope she gets a chance to go on, as I think she will do that role justice.
It is enormously to the credit of the Lammermuir Festival that this concert of largely unfamiliar and dare I say it, challenging, music drew a full house to the large nave of St Mary’s Kirk, and the warm applause at the end reflected the audience’s appreciation of the young singers on show, and the dedication of Scottish Opera to put on different music!
