Susan Gritton

Britten Abroad

Britten's settings of Italian, Russian, French and German, performed here by Susan Gritton, Mark Padmore and Iain Burnside are certainly amongst the most distinctive and very finest examples of his art, each fashioned specifically for a much-loved and favoured artist. The Seven Sonnets of Michelangelo were completed in America in October 1940 and were the first songs written specifically for Britten's life-long partner and principle interpreter, the tenor Peter Pears, to whom they are dedicated and unquestionably addressed. Britten and Pears premiered the Michelangelo Sonnets at the Wigmore Hall on 23 September 1942, the first of many memorable appearances they were to make in London's premiere recital hall over the next three decades. The Poet's Echo was written during a holiday that Britten and Pears spent in the Soviet Union with Galina Vishnevskaya and Mstislav Rostropovich in August 1965.The cycle is dedicated to 'Galya and Slava' and was first performed by the dedicatees in the Small Hall of the Moscow Conservatoire, on 2 December 1965; they gave the UK premiere on 2 July the following year, in London's Royal Festival Hall. Um Mitternacht was written around 1960. It was first performed by the soprano Lucy Shelton and pianist Ian Brown at the 1992 Aldeburgh Festival and only entered the repertory with the publication of The Red Cockatoo & Other Songs by Faber Music in 1994. It is unique in that it's Britten's only setting of Goethe, an anthology of whose verse he received around this time from his friend Prince Ludwig of Hesse and the Rhine, the dedicatee of the final song-cycle on the present disc, the Sechs Hölderlin-Fragmente. Britten and Pears recorded them for the BBC Third programme on 20 October 1958.

Schubert: Mass No. 6 in E flat major, D950

Schubert’s final mass and most ambitious setting was composed during the summer of 1828, only months before his death. It was premiered posthumously, on October 4, 1829, under the direction of his brother, Ferdinand. Much more than his previous efforts in the genre, it is a choral mass, relegating the vocal soloists to three brief episodes to allow for large chorus passages, and provides an extremely active role for the orchestra. Today, the Mass in E Flat is increasingly acknowledged as an individual masterpiece; powerful and disquieting, more monumental than the fifth, but likewise seeking to reconcile liturgical grandeur with Schubert’s own subjective romantic feeling, whilst still influenced by Haydn, Beethoven and Bach. Its concern for splendour is most obvious in the huge set-piece fugues at the end of the Gloria and Credo but all the time liturgical tradition is coloured by an individual and sometimes unsettling chromaticism, possibly evoking the personal pain he was suffering, not only physically but also the anguish of questioning his faith. The result is some of the most violent anguish encountered in a setting of the text. The recording is dedicated to the memory of Francesca McManus, the manager of CM90 who sadly died at the end of November.

Poulenc - Gloria and Motets

Stephen Layton and Polyphony continue to blaze a trail as great interpreters and dazzling performers of a wide range of choral music. Their recent disc of Bruckner’s Mass in E minor and motets was acclaimed as a benchmark recording. For their latest Hyperion disc they turn to some of the most bewitching and unusual, yet well-loved, choral works of the twentieth century. Poulenc’s choral music is a deep expression both of his faith and of his unique musical language. In the various motets, the music responds to the composer’s studies of Bach, Monteverdi, Palestrina and Gabrieli, but is always stylistically progressive. Prominently featured are Poulenc’s distinctive and often ingenious chord progressions. Each motet has its own delightfully etched personality. Poulenc’s Gloria is one of his most enduringly appealing works. In some ways straightforwardly pious, it is also tinged with mischievous irreverence and a sense of rollocking enjoyment. ‘When I wrote this piece’, Poulenc famously recalled, ‘I had in mind those frescoes by Gozzoli where the angels stick out their tongues; and also some serious Benedictine monks I had once seen revelling in a game of football.’ This recording by the Britten Sinfonia, The Choir of Trinity College, Cambridge, Polyphony and the soprano soloist Susan Gritton under Stephen Layton brings out all these aspects in a classic performance.

live recording

Smetana: The Bartered Bride

(comic opera in three acts)

Libretto by Karel Sabina, English version by Kit Hesketh-Harvey

Gluck: Paride Ed Elena

Handel: Messiah

Foundling Hospital Version (1754)

The English Song Series Volume 6 - Gustav Holst