Britten Piano and Violin Concertos – Shelley, Little

A young man’s arrogance is not usually a virtue critics praise, but Britten’s Piano Concerto, op. 13, thrives on exactly that quality — the swagger of a twenty-four-year-old who knew precisely how good he was and wanted the Proms audience of 1938 to know it too. Chandos has now given us a performance that understands this, and understands too the concerto’s darker undertow, which too many pianists sand down into mere brilliance.

Howard Shelley does not sand anything down. His account of the opening Toccata has real teeth. Those pounding repeated notes and knife-edge octave passages come off not as empty pianistic display but as something closer to nervous aggression, the young composer thumbing his nose at the English pastoral establishment he was already impatient with. Edward Gardner and the BBC Philharmonic dig into the orchestral tuttis with matching bite; brass has an edge to it that some rival versions smooth into blandness.

The Waltz is where this rendition really distinguishes itself. Shelley catches its curdled charm, a dance that keeps threatening to become sinister and then pulls back, coy, almost embarrassed by its own implications. There is something of prewar Vienna gone slightly rancid here, a hint of Weill filtered through an English sensibility that would rather die than admit to cabaret influence. I don’t know that “hidden programme” is quite the right term, but something autobiographical seems to be happening beneath the surface. This was, after all, the period when Britten’s relationship with Auden was at its most intense and complicated.

Then there’s the matter of the two third movements, and Chandos deserves credit for giving us both. The 1945 Impromptu that replaced the original Recitative and Aria is the more integrated, more confident piece: sinewy, a little cold, superbly crafted. But hearing the discarded original on its own terms, played here with real sympathy by Shelley, one understands why some listeners have always regretted the substitution. There’s a spaciousness to the Recitative, an operatic breadth even, that points toward the composer of Peter Grimes a full seven years before that opera existed. The clarinet writing alone, plaintive and exposed, sounds like Britten already dreaming of the sea.

I still return, and expect always to return, to Sviatoslav Richter’s 1970 Aldeburgh recording with the composer conducting, an account that finds a strange Russian gravity in music most pianists play as quintessentially English wit. Richter’s granite octaves in the finale carry a weight Shelley doesn’t quite match. Shelley’s reading has a lightness and rhythmic pointing that Richter, characteristically, ignores altogether. Different truths, both valid.

The Violin Concerto is the greater work. Nobody disputes this any longer, though it took decades for the world to catch up with what Britten achieved in 1939, writing it partly in Canada and partly in the shadow of the Spanish Civil War, with the ghost of Falla’s Harpsichord Concerto audibly somewhere in the orchestration. Tasmin Little plays it with a burning intensity that never curdles into sentimentality, which is the trap this piece sets for lesser violinists. Her tone in the opening movement’s long-breathed lines has an ache to it, not showy vibrato but something more vocal, almost speech-like.

The central Vivace is genuinely frightening in this performance: timpani snapping like gunfire, the orchestra’s brass choir turning martial in the ugliest sense. Little’s cadenza, that extraordinary bridge passage where the soloist essentially argues herself into the finale’s Passacaglia, unfolds with a sense of inevitability that some starrier violinists — Kremer among them — have rushed past in their eagerness to display craft. Little takes her time. She trusts Britten’s structural logic, and it pays off in the Passacaglia itself, where Gardner shapes the ground bass with real cumulative weight, never letting the repetitions feel merely dutiful.

Does this unseat Mark Lubotsky’s classic account, or the composer’s own studio release? Perhaps not entirely. There remains an interpretive depth in those older versions, born of direct collaboration with Britten, that no amount of scholarship can quite replicate. But Little and Gardner belong in that conversation now, not as also-rans but as genuine contenders.

Chandos’s engineering, recorded I gather in Manchester, gives both concertos plenty of air without ever losing definition in the busier tuttis. You can hear inner voices in the concerto’s finale that some older recordings simply buried. For the Britten centenary this disc is not a superfluous addition to an already crowded field. It is an essential one, a reminder that this composer’s instrumental music, so often overshadowed by the operas and the great choral works, deserves exactly this kind of committed, intelligent advocacy.