A Britten top ten

By MICHAEL CAINES

Here’s an aside to Ian Bostridge’s magisterial overview, in this week’s TLS, of several new books published to mark the centenary of Benjamin Britten’s birth. The YouTube-illustrated list below represents what one of those books reckons to be the current “Britten Top Ten” – ie, a list of his ten pieces that are “most popular with the public at large”:

1 The Young Person’s Guide to the Orchestra

 

 

2 Four Sea Interludes from Peter Grimes

 

 

3 A Ceremony of Carols (so good he posted it twice, if only for the costumes, and the contrast between soprano and treble soloists)

 

 

 

4 Simple Symphony

 

5 Serenade for tenor, horn and strings

 

6 Soirées Musicales (intially taken here at quite a lick, as befits a precocious early suite inspired by Rossini)

 

 

7 “The Foggy, Foggy Dew”

 

8 A Hymn to the Virgin

 

9 “The Salley Gardens”

 

 

10 "Tell Me the Truth about Love" (the opening flourish puts me off this one – possibly a silly prejudice on my part . . .)

 

The source for this list is what used to be The Faber Pocket Guide to Britten by John Bridcut, first published in 2010, and now revised and elevated to the rank of Essential Britten. It’s a “delightful” compendium, according to our reviewer. There’s much more to the composer’s achievements, however, than the popular pieces mentioned above, as Bridcut is quick to point out. It contains “four or five indisputable masterpieces”, he says (although here he doesn’t say which ones; any guesses?), but it only covers “the first half of Britten’s composing life, and includes nothing sung in his fifteen operatic works”.

Funny he should mention that. This summer the Royal Opera House will tackle one of the most notoriously unpopular of those later operatic works: Gloriana, which seems to have discomforted its first audiences, in the Coronation year of 1953, by looking “beyond the cliché of the Elizabethan past as source of renewal”, as Ian Bostridge puts it, “to a more troubling mapping of that past on to the Elizabethan present”. Is this wise? Given the strength of feeling recently expressed against a mere novelist for daring to speak a troubling word or two about the Duchess of Cambridge, I’m not sure we Brits are ready to look beyond Britten’s top ten. . . .