![]() This SACD contains, in addition to Les Illuminations and the aforementioned Variations, also the Serenade for Tenor, Horn & Strings op.31. Toby Spence colors very nicely with his falsetto in the beautiful Being Beauteous (strangely enough, the British chose an English title here). Les Illuminations (originally for soprano) is sung here in the tenor version for Peter Pears. Right at the start of the cycle, Britten resolutely locks the door to his inner self: 'I alone have the key to this wild parade'. The cycle is a kind of half-hearted 'coming out', in which … British people somewhat hide behind the decadent symbolism of the expert by experience Arthur Rimbaud overly explicit references to "bestial caresses" were discreetly removed. Sorry you are too late, this event has been and gone Hallucinations and wild imaginings: join Finnish musical. In 1939, Britten dedicated the brooding song Antique from Les Illuminations to 'KWHS' (the initials of Wulff Scherchen). Scottish Chamber Orchestra: Les Illuminations. All that's lacking in Our Hunting Fathers is a bit more theatricality in the singing of Phyllis Bryn-Julson, to give the right bite and pungency to WH Auden's savagely satirical texts.Before the strong shoulders of Peter Pears emerged, Britten had a more than warm interest in Wolfgang ('Wulff') Scherchen (the son of the conductor), seven years younger, to whom the composer had once lent his raincoat. In that work and in the wonderful Our Hunting Fathers, arguably Britten's first masterpiece, the orchestral playing under Bedford has exactly the right raw urgency. Le poème Les Ponts est un poème en prose d Arthur Rimbaud, il se trouve dans le recueil Illuminations. C’est un élève indiscipliné, mystérieux, révolté et incompris. Il écrit de ses 16 ans à 20 ans avant de rompre avec la poésie. Felicity Lott is suitably delicate in the Quatre Chansons Françaises, teenage settings rediscovered after Britten's death, but just not vivid enough in the savage passions of the Rimbaud-based Les Illuminations. Introduction Arthur Rimbaud est né en 1854 et mort en 1891. The third, Still Falls the Rain, a setting of an Edith Sitwell poem for tenor, horn and piano, is heard in a curious context, as part of the sequence The Heart of the Matter, which Britten devised around the work with readings (delivered by Judi Dench here) and other short songs on Sitwell texts.Īlongside those, the performances of the three orchestral song cycles with female voices seem far less convincing. The second canticle, Abraham and Isaac, is often performed nowadays with a counter-tenor singing the alto part, but the work was written for Pears and Kathleen Ferrier, and here Langridge is partnered by contralto Jean Rigby, producing a much more coherent sound when the two voices are heard together. The collection of the five canticles, with Langridge again the link between them all, is well worth investigating too. The result is a wonderful bargain, a perfect combination of early, middle-period and late Britten. His performances of the Serenade for Tenor, Horn and Strings and the Nocturne sits alongside Ann Murray's wonderfully touching account of the cantata Phaedra, which is many worlds away from the recording by Janet Baker, for whom the work was composed. En fixant ses délires et ses vertiges, il ouvre les portes de linconscient et de linconnaissable, il transfigure ses visions, invente le surréalisme, les villes du futur, prophétise lère atomique. But he uses those qualities to strikingly different effect. Avec les Illuminations, Rimbaud, à vingt ans, écrit le dernier acte de son ' opéra fabuleux ', le plus énigmatique. The tenor Philip Langridge, for instance, matches Pears in the clarity of his diction and the elegance and musicality of his phrasing. There is no hint here, however, that any of the performers is trying to evoke that earlier generation of singers. ![]() They are performances that preserve one strong link with the mainstream Britten tradition: their common denominator is the conductor and pianist Steuart Bedford, who worked regularly with the composer and conducted many of the late works when Britten became too ill to do it. ![]() they have been bought up by Naxos and reissued in its English song series. These three discs first appeared on Collins Classics in the mid-1990s following that label's demise. Yet any composer's output has to be regularly renewed by succeeding generations of interpreters, and while that renewal has taken rather longer with some of Britten's works than perhaps it should have done, this clutch of discs from Naxos is a reminder of one starting point for the songs at least.
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