Britten's Week

U.S. music lovers have tried hard to keep abreast of Britain's fast-moving young (35) Composer Benjamin Britten. They have seen and heard three of his operas (Paul Bunyan, Peter Grimes, The Rape of Lucretia) among other things, had three operas and a score of other works to go. Last week, Serge Koussevitzky gave his Berkshire Music Center fans a chance to catch two Britten premieres.

First, audiences crammed into Tangle-wood's tiny opera theater to see the first U.S. performance of Benjy's fourth opera Albert Herring (TIME, June 30, 1947), which is already a favorite of English audiences and many English critics.

The story was familiar, at least in outline: Librettist Eric (Let's Make an Opera) Crozier had freely adapted his comic libretto from Guy de Maupassant's Le Rosier de Madame Husson. A bumpkin is chosen King of the May because in the village there is no girl virtuous enough to be Queen, eventually winds up on a roaring toot. To this, Composer Britten hitched a witty, somewhat Peter and the Wolf-ish score, in which each instrument seemed to portray (or mock) a character on stage. There were other Britten trademarks: well-fitting songs and exciting ensembles. Even so, some found Albert's humor, at least in Tanglewood's production, so mordant that it often verged on the grim, and Britten's somewhat patchy score so consciously clever that at times it was irritating. The applause was warm, but not extravagant.

The applause that rolled across the lawns from the great wedge-shaped Music Shed at week's end was still not extravagant, but it had warmed up by several degrees. Conductor Koussevitzky had let Amsterdam's Concertgebouw Orchestra give the world premiere of Britten's Spring Symphony last month, even though he had commissioned it. Last week he was prepared to do the symphony justice himself.

It was not easy. The program notes warned that "the title 'symphony' can only be broadly intended." There was little pure instrumental writing: the "symphony" was more a song cycle of 14 poems, from Spenser and Milton to W. H. Auden, to be sung by soloists and choruses, in various combinations and with a full orchestra. Britten had given the strings comparatively little to do; most of the burden fell on blaring brasses, on rustic horns and bucolic woodwinds. It was rich with unusual effects: while Soprano Frances Yeend sang John Clare's The Driving Boy, the chorus whistled an accompaniment. Even though Britten had barely fussed at all with bridges between song poems, his symphony had a unity of spirit. Fresh, melodic and direct, his Opus 44 seemed to many listeners his best work yet.

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