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Britten, Britten, Britten, why does Toronto hate you so?

By John Terauds on November 22, 2013

britten

Benjamin Britten was born on this day 100 years ago. To many, he is a modern musical hero. Some shrug him off as another 20th century composer too challenging to confront. Yet others call his music simplistic. In Toronto, Stravinsky sells tickets; Britten doesn’t.

I’ve been perplexed all year about Torontonians’ antipathy to Britten’s music. His operas and secular vocal music are in English, making them accessible to every audience member here. Yes, his music can be dissonant, but so is that of his near-peer, Dmitri Shostakovich, who does sell concert tickets.

Every single note and syllable in Britten’s work is significant. There is no excess in his determination to communicate a specific idea or emotion, or to guide our minds down a specific narrative path. The music is as transparent as Mozart’s and just as communicative, but rendered in the often wintry greys of post-Empire Britain rather than the colourful silks and brocades of 18th century Vienna.

This week, the Toronto Mendelssohn Choir offered up a gorgeous performance of two big and moving Britten cantatas, with much-loved tenor Colin Ainsworth as chief soloist. And, I was told, the tickets were the choir’s hardest sell of any concert presented in the last 10 years.

In the spring, I began what I hoped would be a long Sunday series of posts that would introduce readers here to Britten and his music. About four-dozen people read each post — out of a daily readership that was, at the time, hovering between 700 and 800. Needing to be practical about how I spend my time, I gave up.

The experience has left me scratching my head for months now.

Speak to anyone who has actually played or sung Britten, as I have, and you are likely to be speaking to a lifelong fan.

To learn his music is to be taken on a ride where every twist and turn, no matter how hair-raising, is perfectly calculated to never actually put you in danger. To perform his music — when learned well — is to then be left open to those fleeting moments of exaltation, of the soul being liberated from the body and gravity and the Visa bill, that every musician lives and breathes for yet achieves all too rarely.

Even more importantly, Britten makes this experience available to the amateur and to children.

From my memories of growing up and my limited experience as a music teacher, the biggest thrills in young lives come when a kid masters what they think is grown-up music, when they feel they’ve graduated to actually making a significant statement as opposed to singing or playing piddly little children’s pieces.

They know they’re playing children’s pieces, and they know when they’ve been handed the real thing. Why do you think every piano-lesson beginner is desperate to learn Beethoven’s Für Elise? The same is true for Noye’s Fludde or A Ceremony of Carols, to mention Britten’s two most popular works for young people.

Nor was Britten a stickler for beauty for beauty’s sake. To use an expression that would only come along after he was gone, he wanted to keep it real.

Gramophone magazine has posted a beautiful Britten tribute by John Culshaw, originally published a few weeks after the composer’s death on Dec. 4, 1976. It’s not a gushy remembrance, but a keen appreciation for a special talent, seasoned with the anecdotes of a close friend and colleague.

At one point, Culshaw writes:

He loved writing for children, and he loved working with them. He always wanted them to understand just what they were doing, and just what the music was meant to convey. When it came to boys’ voices, he preferred a rougher quality than the ‘pure’ sound of the cathedral choirs, which in his view put the emphasis in the wrong place. It was a view that he applied generally. “Frankly”, he once said to me when we were discussing a casting problem, “I’m not very interested in beautiful voices as such. I’m interested in the person behind the voice”. In other words, a beautiful voice controlled by a mind was a blessing indeed; on the other hand, a mindless beautiful voice was of no interest to him at all. The same, of course, went for instrumentalists and, not unexpectedly, other composers …

You can read the full tribute here.

So, I ask myself, do we not care for Britten because we are collectively too concerned with beauty — from polished live performances to immaculate studio recordings — at the expense of expression?

Are too many composers and critics more dazzled by cleverness than by efficient communication?

Do we fail to challenge our children enough, musically?

In these times, which are more about consumption than production in music as in so much else, have we lost the ability to appreciate a musical challenge as adults?

Unfortunately, I can easily find answers to justify as well as refute any of the above questions. So here I stand, still scratching my head — and thanking the universe for having granted me contact with the remarkable art of Benjamin Britten.

I’ll leave you “Cuckoo,” one of Britten’s Friday Afternoon Songs, sung by the choir of Downside School, Purley (a Roman Catholic independent school for boys and girls in Sussex) from the soundtrack of the 2012 film Moonrise Kingdom:

John Terauds

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