Britten : Intégrale de la musique pour guitare et voix - Nardis, Meucci

Description

The guitar music of the eminent 20th-century British composer Benjamin Britten (1913-1976) comprises three works, all written for the great guitarist Julian Bream. Two of them are collections of songs for high voice, for which Britten naturally drew inspiration from the famous English tenor—and longtime personal and professional partner—Peter Pears. The "Songs from the Chinese," a cycle of six songs set to poems translated from Chinese by Arthur Waley (1889-1966), were composed in 1957 and premiered the following year by the Pears-Bream duo. In the late 1950s, Bream was a highly renowned lutenist and guitarist and had accompanied Pears in works by Dowland and other early music composers from the British Isles, concerts that inspired Britten to compose some original pieces for the duo. His cycle naturally invited comparison with another great collection of Chinese songs, Mahler's "Das Lied von der Erde," and the reception was favorable at the time: "as a whole, they express a vision of life (and notably of the transience of youth and beauty) as poignant and personal as Mahler's" (critic Jeremy Noble in Tempo, 1959). The sixth volume of Britten's lifelong project devoted to folk song arrangements was published in November 1961, in a second wave of releases, alongside volumes four and five, some twelve years after the publication of the first three volumes in the 1940s. Volume six contains six English folk songs and is the only collection he arranged for voice and guitar. These folk song arrangements bear witness to Britten's admiration for Bream as much as the "Songs from the Chinese" do. Indeed, at the premiere of Britten's song cycle at the Aldeburgh Festival (June 17, 1958), Pears and Bream performed three of these folk songs during the same concert. Britten composed the guitar solo "Nocturnal" after John Dowland in 1963 for Bream, who premiered it the following year (June 12, 1964). The nine movements of the work are "variations on a theme," progressing in the reverse order of a classical theme and variations. The model, "Come, Heavy Sleep," from John Dowland's (1563-1626) First Book of Songs, is revealed only at the end, with the variations leading up to it suggesting the song through the treatment of various thematic fragments. Marcello Nardis and Duilio Meucci complete this album with three other works by Dowland, including the original version of "Come, Heavy Sleep" that inspired Britten for "Nocturnal," another famous song, "Flow my tears," and the lute solo "A Dream."