Review: Britten: Music for Radio Plays (The Hallé/Elder)
The British recording label NMC has done wonders making available the rarer works of British composers, and during the Britten centenary turned to that master. With Britten To America they focus on perhaps Britten’s second most important collaborator, the great modernist poet WH Auden, with whom in the 1930s he collaborated in works for radio and stage. Although Auden’s ‘cabaret’ songs would become popular from recitals with Britten’s life partner, the tenor Peter Pears, it’s wonderful to discover them in their original choral context as music for the play The Ascent of F6 (1936), written by Auden in conjunction with Christopher Isherwood on the subject of mountaineering. The other substantial piece here, On the Frontier, comes from the following year and is also written by those two playwrights with a contemporary political eye on a transfer to the West End. Others – namely An American in England and the closing setting by poet Louis Macneice, Where do we go from here?, stem from contemporary BBC radio programmes. Whilst these works may be regarded as peripheral to Britten’s output, there is no doubt as to the professionalism of the group of performers involved and Britten’s compositional brilliance shines through, even in…