Britten Orchestral Works – EMI Classics Edition

Britten conducting Britten always had a peculiar authority — not the authority of the composer merely confirming his own intentions, but something stranger, an interpretive intelligence that kept finding new severity, new tenderness, in scores he had already lived inside for decades. Those Decca recordings, made mostly in the 1960s and early ‘70s with the composer himself on the podium, cast a long shadow. Anyone assembling a complete orchestral survey after his death in 1976 has to reckon with that shadow, and this eight-disc EMI compilation, a repackaging of discs originally issued as part of the label’s Britten “Collectors Edition,” mostly reckons with it honorably.

What you get here is everything Britten saw fit to publish in his lifetime, plus a handful of items that surfaced afterward without requiring an editorial hand to finish them. No Double Concerto, no Two Portraits. This is Britten as he wanted himself known, right down to the orchestral excerpts he pulled from Peter Grimes and Gloriana for the concert hall. A tidy anthology rather than a scholarly excavation.

Libor Pešek gets the largest share of the conducting duties, and his contribution opens the set with real heat. The Sinfonia da Requiem, that extraordinary product of 1940, commissioned by the Japanese government for an imperial anniversary and then rejected for being too Christian in its grief, asks for a director unafraid of extremity. Pešek takes his time in the outer movements, “Lacrymosa” and “Requiem aeternam,” lingering over their processional weight in a way that’s more expansive than Britten’s own brisker approach. The “Dies irae” at the center is where he really shows his hand: he tears into it, whips the strings and brass into something genuinely frightening, and manages the deceleration back into the finale so it reads as inevitability rather than the music simply running out of gas. Not every conductor solves that problem. Pešek does.

His Four Sea Interludes and Passacaglia from Peter Grimes, presented as a continuous five-movement sweep culminating in the “Storm,” works remarkably well as a listening experience even if opera purists will mutter about interludes being yanked from their dramatic context. The oboe solo in “Dawn” has that cold, gull-cry cleanness the music wants; the “Moonlight” has appropriate stillness without going slack. And in The Young Person’s Guide to the Orchestra, Pešek matches Britten’s own famous clarity, milking the viola variation for a kind of aching, almost embarrassed lyricism, then letting the closing fugue really sizzle, brass blazing without turning to mush.

The recorded sound throughout is warmer, less analytically spotlit than what Decca’s engineers gave Britten. You lose some of that startling instrumental isolation, the sense of every desk of strings pinned to a separate acoustic shelf. But nothing important gets buried. Detail survives; it’s simply presented with more blend, more hall.

Simon Rattle, leading the City of Birmingham Symphony on later discs, takes on the repertoire Britten himself never got around to recording, and this is where the set becomes genuinely valuable. The Scottish Ballad for two pianos and orchestra, with Peter Donohoe and Philip Fowke as vivid, unsentimental soloists, is a rare enough visitor to concert programs that any decent recording earns its keep. “Young Apollo,” with Donohoe alone, is slighter, stranger. Britten withdrew it during his lifetime, oddly embarrassed by its brightness, and Rattle treats it with the delicacy of something fragile and half-finished, which in a sense it is. Canadian Carnival is orchestral showmanship of a kind Britten rarely indulged in so nakedly, and Rattle clearly enjoys the garishness of it.

Best of all is A Time There Was, that late suite drawn from folk-song settings, arranged after Britten’s health was already failing. It is elegiac without ever tipping into sentimentality. Rattle finds the ache in it without smearing on the vibrato.

For listeners who already own the composer’s own Decca recordings, this set functions as a thoughtfully engineered supplement, filling in the gaps Britten’s own discography left open. Pešek’s contributions hold their own against formidable historical competition; Rattle’s fill real voids. Eight discs, no filler.