Benjamin Britten conducts Mozart, Britten and Mendelssohn
Benjamin Britten conducts Mozart, Britten and Mendelssohn:

The two concerts on this programme, separated by a little over five years, present two very different Benjamin Brittens. The first, at Croydon in December 1964, shows Britten at the peak of his powers. He is fifty-one years old, lean and fit, energised and beady-eyed, his hair dark and close-cropped...

Ausführliche Beschreibung

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Bibliographische Detailangaben
Weitere Verfasser: Mozart, Wolfgang Amadeus 1756-1791, Britten, Benjamin 1913-1976, Mendelssohn-Bartholdy, Felix 1809-1847
Format: Elektronisch Video
Sprache:English
Veröffentlicht: [Place of publication not identified] BBC, under licence to International Classical Artists Ltd. Licensed courtesy of BBC Worldwide. [2012]
Schlagworte:
Symphonies
Chansons (Voix aiguë) acc. d'orchestre
Songs (High voice) with orchestra
Webcast
Internet videos
Vidéos sur Internet
Online-Zugang:BSB01
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Zusammenfassung:The two concerts on this programme, separated by a little over five years, present two very different Benjamin Brittens. The first, at Croydon in December 1964, shows Britten at the peak of his powers. He is fifty-one years old, lean and fit, energised and beady-eyed, his hair dark and close-cropped. He has upgraded his father's tailcoat, which did him proud in the 1930s and 1940s, and offsets it with patent-leather shoes. He is the recent composer of War Requiem, a piece of international celebrity, and will soon be appointed to the Order of Merit. He will travel to India a few weeks after the concert, part of an unconvincing sabbatical year. The second Britten is on stage at the gala reopening of Snape Maltings Concert Hall in June 1970 following a devastating fire the previous year. His hair is grey, his face puffy, his demeanour that of an old man.
He is dressed as though for an investiture (appropriately, since the Queen is in the audience), and although his performance of the two central movements of Mendelssohn's Symphony No. 3 is a model of fire and restraint, he will finish the concert conducting scenes from his opera Gloriana, head in the score, sweat pouring off his forehead and fogging his heavy glasses. Sadly, in 1970 he was very ill but did not yet know it. Two years earlier he had been diagnosed with endocarditis and had been treated aggressively with penicillin. He had seemingly recovered, but his heart was weakened by the infection and a diagnosis of aortic incompetence in August 1972 would leave him requiring a heart transplant. Those close to him did not notice his physical decline; it is only the juxtaposition of these two performances that makes it so evident.
Although his illness inevitably affects the way we now listen to his performances from the late 1960s and 1970s and think about the pieces he was writing, Britten's music-making was actually undiminished until 1973 when the stroke he suffered on the operating table put paid to most things other than laboured composition. He was anyhow before then a slightly awkward conductor. Marjorie Fass, part of the Frank Bridge circle and a mother figure to Britten in the 1930s, described him in 1938: 'If he goes on for ever he'll never be a conductor -- you never saw anything so stiff & amp; held in.' He developed greater physical fluency over time, but the point of Britten's conducting was never how he looked when doing it; instead it was about the sheer musicality he brought to the task, which British orchestral players, raised on an undernourished diet of blustering conductor-knights, greatly appreciated. Nor did he indulge in the podium antics of Leonard Bernstein --
Beschreibung:1 Online-Ressource (1 video file (1 hr., 7 min., 48 sec.)) sound, color

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