Frustrated, perhaps, by the bulky requirements and dubious future of grand opera—and grand opera commissions—Benjamin Britten created some of his most intriguing and, nowadays, popular pieces for small casts and chamber orchestra. Among these operas are The Rape of Lucretia, Albert Herring and The Turn of the Screw. These smaller forces eventually put these works over very well with schools and financially pressed professionals, and Britten’s harmonic idiom, always more personal than theoretical in a time of much “academic” composition, has kept them more sympathetic to operatic audiences less enslaved to theory and, nowadays, open to an ever wider range of sound. Read more »
Cher Public