Naxos to release Cecilia's recording of "The Construction of Boston."
The CD of Composer in Residence Scott Wheeler's opera will be released during 2008. The libretto, as well as program notes from the April 2007 concert performance, are available now.

"Teeters and his classy cast and players offered the first truly satisfying performance I’ve heard... If I ever forget what a superb programmer he's been over his 39 years of directing Boston Cecilia, remind me of this concert."

-Lloyd Schwartz, The Boston Phoenix, Apr. 5, 2007. Read the review!

Introducing New Music: Recent and Right Now, presenting the music of up-and-coming composers, in collaboration with Scott Wheeler. Annual series debuts in June 2008!

Benjamin Britten's place in twentieth-century music is still being assessed. He was recognized early on as the possessor of an extraordinary gift. Most would name him the greatest English composer since Purcell and the first great indigenous English opera composer. Some critics and colleagues have faulted Britten's choice to chart his own course rather than buy into the more fashionable musical trends of the century. Audiences and performers generally — those who have not found it necessary to man the barricades — have been unconflicted in this regard. For them, his music, even after repeated exposure, continues to move and inspire and seems ever new and necessary. Maybe we have now arrived at a time when to celebrate Britten does not require a corresponding condemnation of the serialists, and vice versa. It was not always the case. One must rue an artistic climate - hardly exclusive to this century, though - that insists on irrelevant comparisons in the arts. Must one despise Brahms to adore Wagner?

Britten took delight in a familiar, commonly understood language of sound as it had evolved over the centuries. He developed a personal vocabulary within that language that is unmistakably his own, marking his music as unquestionably of our time, rooted but original. He had no desire to ostracize C major, but his C major sounds like no one else's. Generally speaking, Britten's music finds a home in the heart and the head in roughly equal shares. Like a great raconteur, Britten could coin a phrase: he could draw out of overworked tools a musical gesture, something astoundingly new and fresh that lodges itself irrevocably in one's memory. His love for the English language and particularly its great poetry found happy companionship in his ability to capture in sound the essence of ideas, images, situation. In that respect his music is reminiscent of Schubert's — a rare gift, even rarer among English composers. With this affinity, it is no wonder that Britten's contributions to the solo vocal literature have been so widely welcomed. That he also devoted so much attention to music for voices in ensemble is a blessing for which groups like ours are deeply grateful.

Tonight's program begins with music drawn from the beginning of Act Two of Gloriana, Britten's 1952 QE2 coronation opera. In the opera these choruses form the centerpiece of a masque presented for the Queen (QE1, of course) as she travels through the countryside receiving homage from her subjects. The choruses imitate sixteenth-century madrigal style in linear and rhythmic terms, though not in harmonic ones.

As an outgrowth of the madrigal tradition, part-song composition has been a fairly constant component of English amateur choral enterprise right down to the present. I Lov'd a Lass and Lift Boy are two of Britten's charming early attempts in that field. Already, though, he marks a clear line of distinction between himself and the Vaughan Williams, Elgar/Parry schools. Here there is wit (beyond cleverness) and precision of tone that says "fresh new voice!"

During the course of his life, Britten developed a fascination with Eastern culture. His ballet The Prince and the Pagoda, with its direct quotations from Balinese music, and Curlew River, a church parable based on Japanese Noh drama, are splendid examples of that interest. The Songs from the Chinese, written for Peter Pears and the brilliant guitarist Julian Bream, are confirmation of Britten's continuing interest in the East. Arthur Waley's translations do not elicit sounds from Britten that explicitly imitate Eastern music, but the use of the guitar as accompaniment does evoke an "exotic"—if not Eastern, then at least non-European— art-song world. Britten, who had not previously scored for guitar, worked closely with the immensely talented Bream and in the event made a work that some consider a paradigm—a work that demands high skill in equal measure from both singer and player.

A.M.D.G. (Ad majorem Dei gloriam, "To the greater glory of God"), dates from 1939 and Britten's first trip to the United States, a richly creative period. For reasons that are not clear, Britten abandoned the work and never brought it forward for publication or performance. Difficulty may have had something to do with it, for the songs make prodigious demands on the performers in terms of range, tonal contrast, verbal dexterity and interpretive insight. A.M.D.G. comprises a virtual catalogue of devices that are recognizable because of their use in later works. The Hopkins poetry takes as its title the motto of the Jesuit order that Hopkins joined at the age of 24. It became a dominating influence on his poetry. And it is the intense spirituality of Hopkins's poems that Britten seems most earnestly to have latched onto. Hopkins's oratorical flights are ingeniously translated by Britten: the cascading, overwhelming repetitions of the opening line of "God's Grandeur"; the relentless pedal point and restless rhythms of "Rosa mystica," pitting grounded faith against the Mystery of the Rose; the harried confession of unworthiness in "O Deus, ego amo te" turned into a headlong tumble of words and music in hurtling recitative; the awesome quiet of "Heaven-haven," an almost unspeakably serene moment of spiritual repose as conclusion. These, and so many other moments where Britten gets inside the poems and gives them back to us in almost lurid detail, mark A.M.D.G. as a work of major importance and a significant addition to the choral repertoire of this century. The first performance of A.M.D.G. was given in 1984, although the score was not published until 1989. This is the first performance in Boston.

Britten produced a number of volumes of folksong transcriptions, a repertoire that other twentieth-century British composers have lovingly explored as well. The works we hear tonight are Britten's only folk settings with guitar accompaniment, and they are masterly in so many ways, not least for bringing this intimate repertoire back into a tonal context reminiscent of their bardic origins. The strummed accompaniments enhance the wit and wistfulness of the vocal lines and create an improvisational tone overall.

Old Abram Brown is a round, the final work in a collection of songs for children called Friday Afternoons. Fancie, for women's voices and piano, is a darting scherzo to Shakespeare's words. The Ballad of Little Musgrave and Lady Barnard is a fast-moving, droll little drama whose origins as a folktale are ancient. It exists in different guises and appears in new musical settings even today. If you are interested, there is a CD recording of the tale, sung by the balladeer Doc Watson, with a plot virtually identical to Britten's but with different music and a different style, of course. Britten's Ballad had an unusual genesis. It was composed in 1943 for British prisoners of war at Oflag VIIb at Eichstätt, Germany, at the request of one of the prisoners there, Richard Wood, a friend. Somehow the score was delivered and the prisoners gave the first performance towards the end of February, 1944. It is a story of adultery and revenge, illustrated cleverly in both the voices and the four-hand piano accompaniment, which itself provides commentary as well as interludes and background. It would seem that wars were different then.

"Blessed Cecilia . . . Appear and inspire." In August 1940 Britten and Peter Pears reunited with Auden for a brief time in Williamstown, Massachusetts, and made plans to collaborate on an American folk opera, Paul Bunyan, and on a Hymn to St. Cecilia. When Britten sailed for home in the spring of 1942, he had Auden's poems in hand and seriously set out to complete the Cecilia work during the crossing. This choral masterpiece is scored for five-part chorus with solos unaccompanied. Auden's evocative poetry is full of lines that Auden surely knew Britten would be unable to resist; his reverberating words found their match in Britten's music. The first part abounds in unadorned triadic harmonies creating a richly sonorous fabric. It is followed by a fleeting, will-o'-the-wisp choral scherzo, which is in turn succeeded by a heartbreaking choral chaconne, in which the soprano soloist reflects rapturously on lost innocence, with other soloists taking up in turn Auden's instrumental references to violin, flute, drum, and trumpet. The whole work is tied together by the recurring "Blessed Cecilia" refrain. It pleases me to have been able to include this twentieth-century masterpiece in my first concert as Cecilia's music director in 1968, and again in this the final concert of the season in which my friends and I celebrate our thirtieth anniversary together.

- Donald Teeters

The Boston Cecilia performed these pieces at New England Conservatory's Jordan Hall in Boston on April 10, 1999.

© 2004 Donald Teeters. All rights reserved.

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