Lyric Fest salutes Benjamin Britten

Britten’s argument probably wouldn’t have swayed an American draft board. The British accepted it and arrived at a very English resolution.

The young composer was ordered to serve the war effort by organizing musical events throughout the country. Britten complied and spent the war years organizing concerts for church choirs and other provincial amateur groups.

That wartime experience led to Britten’s lifelong interest in composing high-quality works for amateur musical groups, a series of compositions that began, in 1946, with the St. Nicolas cantata Choral Arts Philadelphia performed at the end of its Britten commemorative on November 17.

Three well-chosen singers

Then, this past weekend, actor Jim Bergwall gave Britten’s statement a moving, perfectly tempered recital at Lyric Fest’s latest “Biography in Music”— a format that creates a portrait from a stream of musical numbers, bits of narration and excerpts from letters and other documents.

Between them, Lyric Fest and Choral Arts bracketed the 100th anniversary of Britten’s birth on November 22. Choral Arts naturally focused on Britten’s choral output; Lyric Fest expanded the range of the tribute by including his art songs, arrangements of traditional English songs and excerpts from operas.

The Lyric Fest concert featured three exceptionally well-chosen young singers. Soprano Kelly Ann Bixby possesses a beautifully round voice with some of the coloring of an alto. William Ferguson owns a pleasant, reedy tenor that suits English music. Jarrett Ott brought the same kind of grace and style to the baritone solos. All three singers proved that they can move between intensely dramatic operatic excerpts and the more restrained, nuanced style that art song requires.

Lyric Fest’s masterful accompanist, Laura Ward, contributed her customary yeoman stint at the piano, providing accompaniments that created scenes, evoked moods and even managed to suggest an orchestra sounding a fanfare.

Following language

Britten isn’t the sort of composer who produces hummable melodies. His vocal pieces work because they evoke emotion and move with the natural flow of the language. His setting of Tyger, Tyger embodies the drive and dark intensity inherent in the rhythms of William Blake’s poem. His music for Billy Budd’s last speech before his hanging plays like a soliloquy by a great actor.

When Britten arranged a melodious traditional song, on the other hand, he let the melody speak for itself and added just enough embellishment to keep it from becoming monotonous. Ott’s rendition of The Salley Gardens produced one of the concert’s most appealing interludes.

Britten was born the year before World War I broke out, and the war and its after-effects shaped his outlook throughout his life. When he wrote his War Requiem after World War II, he combined the text of the Latin mass with the words of the World War I poet Wilfred Owen. He turned to a victim of the first war even though he had witnessed the second war’s devastation of Europe and played for the survivors of Bergen-Belsen two weeks after the allies liberated that death camp.

Like Hemingway

You don’t have to be a pacifist to respond to the War Requiem and Britten’s other commentaries on war, such as his opera Owen Wingrave. I treasure Britten’s war pieces for the same reason I value the work of Ernest Hemingway, a writer with a very different attitude.

Both were serious men who created great works of art out of their reactions to the violence of the 20th Century. Hemingway would have understood the emotions behind the War Requiem. Britten would have understood A Farewell to Arms and Hemingway’s World War I short stories about veterans crippled and emotionally numbed by the war.

But Britten’s war pieces only constitute a portion of his output. The breadth and variety of his work can obscure his stature as a composer. You can’t appreciate his importance if you limit your listening to one or two types of music, as most of us do. You must listen to his major contributions to opera, choral music, orchestral music, art song and chamber music.

Creation vs. action

Lyric Fest sampled most of it and linked it to a life that confronted some of the most important social and artistic conundrums of our age. Britten lived a life of creation, not action, but his work deals with issues like war, human suffering, the social life of the aberrant personality, and the tension between art and democratic ideals. Even when he turned to traditional material, such as Shakespeare’s Midsummer Night’s Dream, Britten approached it with a thoroughly modern sensibility.

Choral Arts concluded last week’s Britten commemoration with the audience responding to St. Nicolas’s death by singing “God Moves in a Mysterious Way, His Wonders to Perform,” as called for in Britten’s score. This weekend Lyric Fest ended its program with the death scene from St. Nicolas. So two Sundays in a row my afternoon ended with the same bit of audience participation.

It’s a wonderful way to end a musical event. Britten liked it so much, in fact, that he used it to conclude his life. When he died in 1976, his funeral service ended in the same way, at his request.