This album brings together some of Britten's most celebrated music for treble voices, accompanied and unaccompanied, ranging in period from 1929 (when the composer was still in his mid teens and a pupil of Frank Bridge) to 1967. " A triumph of the realist Britten" (Redlich) drawing largely on texts from Walter de la Mare's collection Tom Tiddler's Ground, Friday Afternoons (1933-35), the first of Britten's many works for children, was written for his schoolmaster brother, Robert and the boys of Clive House preparatory school, Prestatyn: choir practice used to take place on Friday afternoons. The twelve settings, with their witty piano accompaniments, belong to an England between two world wars, to an age of innocence, to a childhood time of Meccano sets and Hornby trains, of model boats and Arthur Ransome. These " enchanting fresh songs," Pears says, " a performance of which, given by well-trained boys and girls with their intelligent teacher at the piano, once heard is never forgotten". Their imagination and economy remains extraordinary. All are beautiful. Most are short. The last -Old Abram Brown - aspires to Wunderhorn Mahler (the slow movement of the First symphony). Together with Hymn to Saint Cecilia and Rejoice in the Lamb, A Ceremony of Carols, written "at sea, MS Axel Johnson March 1942" en route from New York to Liverpool via Boston and Halifax, Nova Scotia, helped establish Britten "as a master of English song" |
