2 - Performing Early Britten: Signs of Promise and Achievement in Poèmes nos. 4 and 5 (1927)

Summary

One of the most exciting discoveries to have come out of work on the Benjamin Britten Thematic Catalogue has been the sheer scope and extent of the composer's juvenilia, now known to comprise over 700 distinct works, written between the ages of six and eighteen. These juvenile pieces and sketches, together with other documents such as diaries and letters from the period constitute, as Lucy Walker has noted, ‘a substantial piece of his own childhood that he literally carried from place to place throughout his life’. The ‘value’ that the composer invested in his early compositions, and his stated reason for keeping them throughout his adult life was, as he told Imogen Holst, ‘the chance it gave of seeing how a child's mind worked’ and this remains a valid reason for scholarly interest in the juvenilia today, now that the composer is firmly established as one of the most significant creative artists of the 20th century.

A particularly tantalizing thread running through the corpus of early work is the gradual development of Britten's orchestral technique in a sequence of scores written in a period when, prior to the start of his formal composition studies with Frank Bridge, the young composer was nevertheless able to impose upon himself a self-discipline that ensured, as Christopher Mark has noted ‘a steady of improvement of skills and [an] expansion of creative vision’, coupled with ‘a determination to see a project to its conclusion’. The Britten Study Day at the University of East Anglia in April 2008 provided an appropriate environment in which Britten's youthful ‘determination’ could at last be rewarded and his imagined sound world in some of these juvenile scores brought to life for the first time by real orchestral forces. The experience provided for the audience a powerful demonstration of the importance that performance can play in disseminating the research findings of the project as they relate to the development of Britten's early style. For me as the conductor it also presented a particular challenge to present the most convincing case both for the music itself and its orchestral presentation, balancing the problems created by the inevitable limitations in technique and weaknesses in form with a sensitivity to the young composer's individual voice and emerging creative vision.