Britten's Cello Sonata

Extract

Recent opportunities given by the Third Programme for hearing Britten's chamber music again may have helped to dispel the faintly patronising air which has often been adopted towards all his instrumental works by those who profess to find there something less than the overwhelming mastery of his word settings. The two quartets show a marked originality of structural proportion as well as that flair for textures we have taken for granted in no other English composer in his early thirties, and the Lachrymae meditations reveal unsuspected shades of sombre colouring. Britten's return to this field after more than a decade arouses keen expectancy, particularly if we reflect on his artistic development during those years. Without totally effacing the impression of almost prodigal spontaneity that has been his stamp since the earliest works, he has effected an inner economy of material, often by motivic practices of unusual subtlety and strength. Outwardly too, with Winter Words and Turn of the Screw, we have begun to recognize a laconic utterance that is very compelling: it is seen in individual movements like the fifth Chinese Song or the Shakespeare setting in the Nocturne, but it also makes possible the changing vignettes of the first act of Midsummer Night's Dream, and the fleet progress of the Cantata Academica through thirteen sections in some twenty minutes.