Now, if you want to accompanying me to England, I’ll show you some music from there:
Benjamin Britten, (1913-1976)
In the summer of 1930, a precocious British teenager was asked by a fellow party guest what he planned to do with his life. ``I'm going to be a composer,'' answered Benjamin Britten. ``Yes,'' came the response, ``but what else?''
This attitude, though perhaps insensitive, was not entirely unreasonable. The great American composer Charles Ives supported himself by selling insurance. Borodin was a chemist, Tchaikovsky a bureaucrat, Bach a church organist, and Bernstein and Mahler made ends meet by conducting the New York Philharmonic. But Britten, like many before him, was determined to find success on his own terms. In 1935 he landed a position scoring films for a small documentary company, the GPO Film Unit. He was successful at this assignment, producing music for such odd titles as Conquering Space and Banking for the Millions. It was an important time in his life; the pressures of the job forced him to rapidly improve his compositional skills, and at the same time he met the poet W.H. Auden, who would become a lifetime collaborator and companion.
BRITTEN: The Young Person's Guide to the Orchestra (1946)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4vbvhU22uAM&list=PLEKS0HFh3cqy_S_0YajGfSSIXGQva2AEE&index=10
Is a musical composition by Benjamin Britten with a subtitle "Variations and Fugue on a Theme of Purcell". It was originally commissioned for an educational documentary film called The Instruments of the Orchestra. The work is one of the best-known pieces by the composer, and is one of the three popularly used scores in children's music education, together with Saint-Saëns' The Carnival of the Animals and Prokofiev's Peter and the Wolf.
Each variation -with some different and evocative characters- is evolved in different of the sections in the orchestra. This propitiates such different sonorous colors and textures.
BRITTEN: Simple Symphony, for string orchestra (1934)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RH0OjuiEvwk&list=PLEKS0HFh3cqxJtohSOKfx2vR8xLkfYNzZ&index=1
This youthful work is formed by four movements:
I. Boisterous Bourrée
II. Playful Pizzicato
III. Sentimental Saraband ( you see, very nice!!)
IV. Frolicsome Finale
Canadian Carnival Overture , Op. 19 (1939) ?????????? :sh_ut:
Although it appears to be sufficient for the moment with real Canadian Carnival lived in London (Canada) last Worlds.
(Actually this work exists, but I don’t like so much and I think is not very interesting for skating. Sorry, I only wrote it to make a joke… I know I have done something bad but…sometimes I like to be a bad girl). :de_vil:
More seriously . Now some special by the same composer but much more mature and personal works. I accept certain amount of eccentricity to these two choices but I think it is worth an attentive listening (more than once maybe) and take them into account. :smu:sche_nie:
BRITTEN: Four Sea Interludes , Op 33a from Opera Peter Grimes
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-6esm67yWpA&list=PLEKS0HFh3cqy8q_VRsfCuK4tyKPW54YTW&index=1
1. Dawn ( Lento e tranquillo )
2. Sunday Morning ( Allegro spiritoso )
3. Moonlight ( Andante comodo e rubato )
4. Storm ( Presto con fuoco )
You see, the orchestration is very personnel and the author manages particularly colors from orchestra.
BRITTEN: Six Metamorphoses after Ovid for solo oboe (1951), with quotations from Ovid's Metamorphoses poem.
If you like something different, get it here!. I particularly like the first one, pity that is so short even for short program but with other aid?
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vh96omI0bYE&list=PLEKS0HFh3cqw7o-rmqNdzGdeIjbmjNacB
1. Pan , who played upon the reed pipe which was Syrinx, his beloved.
2. Phaeton , who rode upon the chariot of the sun for one day and was hurled into the river Padus by a thunderbolt.
3. Niobe , who, lamenting the death of her fourteen children, was turned into a mountain.
4. Bacchus , at whose feasts is heard the noise of gaggling women's tattling tongues and shouting out of boys.
5. Narcissus , who fell in love with his own image and became a flower.
6. Arethusa , who, flying from the love of Alpheus the river god, was turned into a fountain.
Going to change the composer:
Ralph Vaughan Williams (1872–1958)
Was an English composer of symphonies, chamber music, opera, choral music, and film scores. He was also a collector of English folk music and song: this activity both influenced his editorial approach to the English Hymnal, beginning in 1904, in which he included many folk song arrangements set as hymn tunes, and also influenced several of his own original compositions.
First, the well-known:
Vaughan Williams: Fantasia on Greensleeves (1934) (4’40’’ aprox.)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jCKR2EqUjjg (various versions and lirics; first of all is by Vaughan Williams )
The tune based on was found in several late-16th-century and early 17th-century sources, such as Ballet's MS Lute Book and Het Luitboek van Thysius, as well as various manuscripts preserved in the Cambridge University libraries.
Vaughan Williams: The Lark Ascending for violin and orchestra (1914)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZR2JlDnT2l8
Inspired by George Meredith's 122-line poem of the same name about the skylark. He included this portion of Meredith's poem on the flyleaf of the published work:
He rises and begins to round,
he drops the silver chain of sound,
of many links without a break,
in chirrup, whistle, slur and shake.
For singing till his heaven fills,
‘tis love of earth that he instils,
and ever winging up and up,
our valley is his golden cup
and he the wine which overflows
to lift us with him as he goes.
Till lost on his aerial rings
in light, and then the fancy sings.
I hope you like!! :-):