Best of Britten

The 16th Beijing Music Festival celebrates Benjamin Britten’s centenary by introducing two of the composer’s most successful large-scale works to Chinese audiences. Charles Dutoit conducts the London Voices, the Shanghai Symphony Orchestra and the Shanghai Spring Children’s Choir in the China premiere of Britten’s War Requiem, Three nights later (Oct. 8), London Voices returns with the Hangzhou Philharmonic Orchestra under the baton of conductor Duncan Ward in the China premiere of Peter Grimes, the tragic tale of an outcast village fisherman and the first of Britten’s operas to become both a critical and popular success.

A Tribute to Benjamin Britten - War Requiem, Op. 66 (China Premiere) Time: 19:30, Saturday 5 October 2013 Venue: Poly Theater Tickets: RMB VIP / 180 / 120 / 80 For the centenary year of Benjamin Britten, the Beijing Music Festival presents the China premiere of War Requiem, his landmark work which premiered in 1962 for the consecration of Coventry Cathedral, newly rebuilt after being destroyed by German bombs during the Second World War. A musical milestone of the 20th century and a worthy addition to the canon of Requiems (alongside those of Mozart, Brahms,Verdi and Fauré), Britten’s War Requiem is indebted to the dramatic arc of Verdi’s Requiem yet similar to Brahmsin juxtaposing traditional liturgy with vernacular texts. In Britten’s case, the poetry was written by Wilfred Owen, a soldier killed in combat during the First World War, a choice fully reflecting Britten’s own pacifist, anti-war sentiments. The three soloists in the world premiere were from Russia, Britain and Germany,emphasizing the universality of peace. For the work’s 2013 China premiere, soloists from these countries make an equally impressive lineup. One of Britten’s most inspiring strokes of genius was adding a children’s chorus—treble voices both to accentuate the innocence of lives lost and to offer hope for the future. This is an event not to be missed. “My subject is War, and the pity of War. The Poetry is in the pity…All a poet can do today is warn.” – Wilfred Owen (from the title page of the score to Britten’s War Requiem) “London Voices is the dream of choral virtuosi.” – John Adams

A Tribute to Benjamin Britten - Peter Grimes, Op. 33, Concert Version (China Premiere) Time: 19:30, Tuesday 8 October 2013 Venue: Poly Theater Tickets: RMB VIP / 180 / 120 / 80 Hailed by many as the most significant British opera in more than two centuries, Peter Grimes was conceived during the Second World War while the composer was living in California, when he came across an article by E. M. Forster on the 18thcentury poet George Crabbe. A tragic story about a sadistic fisherman named Peter Grimes became to Britten an allegory of “a subject very close to my heart—the struggle of the individual against the masses. The more vicious the society, the more vicious the individual.” The opera’s premiere in 1945 in at the Sadler’s Wells Theatre marked Britten’s reputation as England’s greatest young composer. Its subsequent success the following year at Tanglewood under the baton of Leonard Bernstein thrust Britten into the limelight as a major international talent. Orchestral music from Peter Grimes—especially the Interludes, depicting different moods of the sea—has earned many fans not only in the opera house but also the concert hall. “What is home? Calm as deep water.Where’s my home? Deep in calm water.Water will drink my sorrows dry, And the tide will turn.” – Peter Grimes (Act IV), from the libretto by Montagu Slater “Benjamin Britten’s Peter Grimes is a national treasure: it is the British opera.” –The Guardian