A health librarian and music: Benjamin Britten

Looking around recently for some music to play while working from home (music that was not J.S. Bach), I came across this on the BBC iPlayer streaming service.  I suspect the link may work only in the UK.

It's a recital given by the composer Benjamin Britten (on piano) and the singer Peter Pears, first broadcast in 1964, with everyone dressed very properly.  

Britten and Pears start with three songs portraying women, with short introductions by Pears.   Much of what they perform is arrangements of English folk song, and they end with a song that was on a CD we had when our eldest was very small, Oliver Cromwell is buried and dead.    This, the encore, ends with the line "if you want any more, you must sing it yourself".   Very folk club.  

I was introduced to folk song by my Dad, who, however, did not approve of "classical" arrangements like this (or those by Vaughan Williams).     I do rather like these arrangements, although they are not like the versions we would have heard in the folk clubs or which my Dad sang around the house (we could never persuade him to sing solo in folk clubs).

The songs Britten and Pears choose in the early 1960s, to portray women, is interesting.   It is also interesting what Pears says about the songs, in his introductions.   Did anyone in the audience know Britten and Pears were gay?    The iPlayer page says it was an audience of friends, so maybe someone did.  Although it is a big audience, so maybe they were not all close friends!    Britten died in 1976, and I think I remember that news stories did mention that he lived with Pears, but I am not sure they were referred to as gay or as a couple.   

Britten was, like me, from Suffolk, being from Lowestoft in north Suffolk, a town I used to visit with my grandparents.  It was the nearest seaside to Beccles, where they lived and where my Mum was born.   It is so north in Suffolk that people read the Norwich daily newspaper, the Eastern Daily Press (I used to collect my grandparents' "EDP" from the newsagent) and are more likely to support Norwich City than Ipswich Town.

This is an interesting looking read about Britten's treatment of folk song, from a blog for his centenary year.   There is also this Britten Song Database.

This is the website of Britten Pears Arts, who look after the Red House in Aldeburgh, where Britten and Pears lived.