Programme Notes

Double Concerto (1932)

Britten was so remarkably prolific as a young composer that many of the works from his teens were put aside to await revision or completion as he rushed on to the next piece. This is particularly the case around the time of his Op. I Sinfonietta of 1932 - his second year as a student at the Royal college of Music - which was actually composed in the middle of work on the Double Concerto.

Although the concerto follows the same three-movement pattern as the Sinfonietta, it is more ambitious in scale (lasting nearly twenty-five minutes); and since the sketch is, unusually for Britten, complete in practically every detail, it is puzzling that he was never clear whether he had particular performers in mind, but it is distinctly possible that his experience in rehearsing the Sinfonietta at the Royal College in the autumn (’I have never heard such an apalling [sic] row!’, he wrote in his diary) discouraged him from completing the Double Concerto.

The music of the concerto is characteristic of Britten at that time, although not so adventurous as the Sinfonietta - a consequence perhaps of the contrast between his composition teacher at the College John Ireland, to whom he showed the work, and his mentor Frank Bridge. The first movement is lively and virtuosic, dominated by the horn call that opens the work. The second movement (there are no breaks between movements) is rhapsodic, with long solo passages for the two protagonists. If these two movements tend towards the conventional, the brilliant tarantella-like finale and sudden return at the end to the music of the first movement are as original as anything he had written to date.

In the absence of Britten’s full score, I have had to prepare the work from the sketch. But the instrumentation is so carefully indicated in the draft that what will be heard is virtually 100 per cent Britten. The Double Concerto is the most recent addition to a corpus of works, dating mostly from Britten’s youth and early maturity, that, since his death, have been revived after many years, or performed for the first time. Britten himself frequently returned to his early works, and in his last years revised both the early String Quartet in D of 1931 and the opera Paul Bunyan.

© Colin Matthews
Aldeburgh Festival, June 1997

Two Portraits (1930)

I. D. Layton (for strings)
II. E.B.B. (for viola solo and strings)

Britten’s Two Portraits for strings - the composer himself called them ‘Sketches’ - were composed in August and September 1930, during the summer holidays preceding the sixteen-year-old composer’s first term at the Royal College of Music in London. As their titles (and subtitles) suggest, both are musical depictions of character, the first (Britten’s own string instrumentation), is a self-portrait of the composer. According to Britten’s diary, he planned to compose a third portrait, again for strings, which was to depict another school friend, Peter Floud, but this movement was not written. However, David Layton was to be portrayed again, though very differently, in Britten’s later quartet suite, Alla Quartetto Serioso (1933), itself revised and retitled in 1936 as Three Divertimenti.

As with virtually all the orchestral music from his youth, Britten did not hear either portrait performed. The first performance of Two Portraits was given by the Northern Sinfonia, conducted by Martyn Brabbins, and broadcast by BBC Radio 3 on 5 December 1995, as part of a series entitled ‘Britten’s Apprenticeship’. The first concert performance of Portrait No. 1 was given by the Britten Chamber Orchestra conducted by Andreas Mitisek, at the Konzerthaus, Schubert-Saal, Vienna, on 10 February 1996. The first concert performance of Portrait No. 2 was given by Sinfonia 21, conducted by Martyn Brabbins, in February 1996 at St John’s Smith Square, London.

© Donald Mitchell/Philip Reed
Aldeburgh Festival, June 1997