BENJAMIN BRITTEN

Benjamin Britten, a composer, pianist and conductor, is the central figure of the 20th-century English music. He has produced works of various genres, but vocal music occupies a special place in Britten’s oeuvre. 15 of his operas revived this genre, which has been abandoned in England. He also wrote many other vocal works: songs, vocal cycles and cantatas, as well as carols, shanties and anthems, the genres of idiomatic English vocal music. In addition to poems by English poets of various periods, the composer also set to music poetry of Chinese poets, Michelangelo and A. Pushkin. For Les Illuminations (The Illuminations), the song cycle for soprano or tenor and string orchestra, Op. 18, Britten employed the texts by Arthur Rimbaud. Once, reading poems by this 19th-century French poet, the composer made a promise to himself: ”I must wrap them in music”. Although many French composers sidestepped this poet, for they considered him being too sharp, Britten felt a strong association with Rimbaud’s works. The premiere of the 10-movement cycle took place in London on January 30, 1940 and featured Swiss soprano Sophie Wyss (to whom this opus is dedicated) and string orchestra conducted by maestro Boyd Neel. Les Illuminations (The Illuminations) is a blank verse, prose-like poetry saturated with surrealist visions. Britten felt and conveyed the subtleties of the French language and the nuances of a complex text perfectly, and intonated the word sensitively.

“J’ai tendu des cordes de clocher à clocher; des guirlandes de fenêtre à fenêtre; des chaînes d’or d’étoile à étoile, et je danse” (I have stretched ropes from bell-tower to bell-tower; garlands from window to window; chains of gold from star to star, and I dance), sings Lithuanian tenor Edgaras Montvidas, the megastar of the world’s opera houses, accompanied by the Lithuanian Chamber Orchestra. Nicholas Milton, an Australian master of the baton, graces the podium.