Britten: Orchestral Works – Pešek

Eight discs, one composer, and the ghost of the composer himself hovering over every downbeat. That’s the peculiar challenge EMI has set for the conductors assembled here. Britten was not an easy man to follow on the podium: he left behind him such precise, unsentimental, curiously athletic accounts of his own scores that anyone coming after him has to decide, consciously or not, whether to genuflect or to strike out on his own.

Libor Pešek mostly does both, and the results are exhilarating. His Sinfonia da Requiem opens the set and immediately signals that this will not be a mere waxworks tribute. The “Lacrymosa” and closing “Requiem aeternam” move with more grief-stricken deliberation than Britten allowed himself — the composer, on his 1963 recording with the London Symphony Orchestra, always seemed in a hurry to get past his own sorrow. Pešek lingers. But the “Dies irae” is where he really shows his hand: he lets the RLPO off the leash entirely, brass biting hard, timpani cracking like small-arms fire, and the deceleration into the finale reads as inevitable, even devastating. This is as good an account of Britten’s angriest symphonic utterance as anyone has put on disc since Previn.

The Four Sea Interludes get similar treatment. Pešek’s decision to reinstate the “Passacaglia” as a genuine fourth movement rather than an afterthought pays off — the cellos dig into that ground bass with real weight, so that “Storm” arrives not as a separate showpiece but as the culmination of accumulated dread. Peter Grimes himself would have approved, I think; Britten’s own concert excerpts always felt a little disjointed by comparison.

The Young Person’s Guide to the Orchestra is a trickier proposition. Everybody has recorded it, from Stokowski to Ashkenazy, and the danger is cuteness — a piece condescending to its audience even as it educates them. Pešek avoids that trap. His fugue at the close sizzles, genuinely virtuosic playing from the Liverpool woodwinds, and he draws out the viola variation with an ache that few rivals bother to find. Only Britten’s own Decca recording, with the LSO in blazing analog sound, quite matches him for character, and even there I’d call it a close-run thing.

Simon Rattle’s contributions, scattered through the second disc and beyond with his City of Birmingham Symphony, serve a different function entirely — filling gaps rather than challenging benchmarks, since these are pieces Britten himself never got around to recording. The Scottish Ballad, with Peter Donohoe and Philip Fowke duetting at the keyboards, is genial, occasional-sounding music, and Rattle treats it exactly that way: no pretension, plenty of Hebridean color, a nice sense of two pianists enjoying each other’s company. Young Apollo is stranger and better — Donohoe alone this time, sunlit and faintly troubling in equal measure, a piece Britten wrote in 1939 and then suppressed for decades, still too rarely performed. Rattle finds its ambiguity without overplaying it.

The late suite A Time There Was, drawn from English folk-song settings, gets an interpretation of real tenderness from Rattle. This is Britten near the end of his life, ill, contracting his canvas, and there’s an autumnal quality here that the CBSO strings catch beautifully, a hushed inwardness that never tips into sentimentality. Canadian Carnival and the An American Overture are makeweights, frankly, but agreeably played ones. Britten’s American years produced some odd, occasional music, and it’s good to have it preserved even if nobody would call it essential.

Sonically the set is serviceable rather than sumptuous. EMI’s engineering across these sessions, spanning different venues and years, lacks the vivid analog spotlight Decca gave Britten’s own recordings, where every desk of strings seemed etched in acid. Instruments blend more than they separate here. But detail still comes through, and the difference is one of aesthetic choice as much as technical limitation.

Is this collection indispensable? For the Britten completist, undoubtedly — nowhere else will you find this range of orchestral music under one roof, at what amounts to bargain-box pricing for eight discs. For the general collector wanting just the Sinfonia da Requiem, the Sea Interludes, and the Young Person’s Guide, Britten’s own Decca recordings remain the true north, and probably always will. But Pešek belongs in that conversation now, not merely as an also-ran but as a real contender. That is no small compliment to pay a conductor stepping into such heavily trodden ground.