Sinfonia da Requiem

[jayne lee wilson]

I am with HS - unremitting sort of programme! The Sinfonia the light and easy piece .

The Britten piece I would happily never hear again is the Spring Symphony - ghastly stuff .

The Spring Symphony is a masterpiece - but you can only really see that after... either many hearings, or by just forgetting about sonata-based, 3, 4 or 5 movement abstract forms, surrendering yourself to a song-symphony of an entirely different emotional impact compared to say, Lied von der Erde or DSCH 14... it's not an agonised personal response, but a joyful, pastoral, Pantheistic celebration of human responses to all that Spring represents....

Oh, er, discuss, etc... or just listen again (and again, and again.)

But please don't call it "ghastly stuff"... Britten's ghost may pay you a visit...
(or I'll be round there in my jeans and black leather jacket with an armful of Sea Symphonies...)

[Barbirollians]

I had the Previn version on cassette - and I tried I really did but I couldn't stick it at all . I am afraid the children's choir I found particularly ghastly.

[jayne lee wilson]

Ah well, some you win...
Could I prevail upon you to listen to it for forty days and forty nights...?

[gradus]

It always seems to me to be so gruelling with that gut-wrenching climax used in the World at War series - where I first came across the piece, that I rarely listen to it at home.
I have the Previn recording but the performance I remember most vividly was live at the RFH with Ashkenazy conducting the Philharmonia.

[gradus]

Err, SdR not Spring Sym.

[Ferretfancy]

I don't think that the Spring Symphony is ghastly stuff, but I do find it a surprisingly cold piece given its subject. It also has a slightly contrived air, as if the forces required have been gathered and then a decision made on what they are going to do. There isn't the infectious pleasure that is there in Noye's Floode, with which it has some similarities. There isn't a work by Britten without inspired moments, but let's just say that for me it doesn't leap off the shelves very often.

[rauschwerk]

I had the Previn version on cassette - and I tried I really did but I couldn't stick it at all . I am afraid the children's choir I found particularly ghastly.

Yes, Previn's kids are really no good at all. I tried JEG but could only agree with the comments about the Finale in the Penguin Guide. I avoided Hickox (warned off by Penguin again) and in the end got the Britten and loved it.

I first heard this piece when the composer conducted it at his 50th birthday Prom, then sang it with LSO/Kertesz in 1966 - that was really thrilling and I have loved the piece unreservedly ever since. Contrived? Good heavens, no!

[Mary Chambers]

The Spring Symphony is a masterpiece - but you can only really see that after... either many hearings, or by just forgetting about sonata-based, 3, 4 or 5 movement abstract forms, surrendering yourself to a song-symphony of an entirely different emotional impact compared to say, Lied von der Erde or DSCH 14... it's not an agonised personal response, but a joyful, pastoral, Pantheistic celebration of human responses to all that Spring represents....

Oh, er, discuss, etc... or just listen again (and again, and again.)

But please don't call it "ghastly stuff"... Britten's ghost may pay you a visit...
(or I'll be round there in my jeans and black leather jacket with an armful of Sea Symphonies...)

I loved it the moment I heard it, and found more in it the more I listened. If I need cheering up, I play Britten's recording. How anyone can find it 'ghastly' or 'cold' is beyond me. The beginning is cold, I suppose, when Spring has yet to burst upon us. That's rather the point.

It's one of the few big choral works I've never sung, a cause of huge regret to me.

[Parry1912]

I am afraid the children's choir I found particularly ghastly.

How dare you knock my old school!

[BBMmk2]

Another way i fiond is useful to get a certain kind of structure to Britten's Spring Symphony, is thgat I sometimes think of this as a Cantata. Opinions?

[Serial_Apologist]

Another way i fiond is useful to get a certain kind of structure to Britten's Spring Symphony, is thgat I sometimes think of this as a Cantata. Opinions?

It's OK to call it a symphony, I think - in the same way one does three of Stravinsky's, departing as they do from orthodox symphonic structures and essentially eschewing compensating organic growth alternatives, for want of the right terms! Also Messiaen's Turangalila.

[EdgeleyRob]

The Spring Symphony is a masterpiece

It is indeed!