{"id":19606,"date":"2022-10-04T00:00:00","date_gmt":"2022-10-03T22:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/c01.purpledshub.com\/bbcmusicmagazine\/?post_type=purple_issue&p=19606"},"modified":"2022-10-06T11:42:46","modified_gmt":"2022-10-06T09:42:46","slug":"britten-pears-art","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/c01.purpledshub.com\/bbcmusicmagazine\/2022\/10\/04\/britten-pears-art\/","title":{"rendered":"Britten-Pears Art"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Britten-Pears Art<\/h4>\n\n

Britten\u2019s got talent\u2026<\/h2>\n\n

As the Britten-Pears Young Artist Programme celebrates its 50th anniversary, Tom Stewart <\/strong><\/span>speaks to past and present staff and students <\/p>\n\n

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Notable alumni:<\/strong> former Britten-Pears Young Artists gather for the 50th anniversary at The Red House<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n
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Mezzo Lotte Betts-Dean in recital in 2022<\/figcaption><\/figure><\/div>\n\n

In October 1976, the tenor Peter Pears was in Canada to perform music by Benjamin Britten, his partner of 37 years. Midway through a newspaper interview, the phone rang. The news from Suffolk was bad: Britten, just 62 but with a failing heart, was fading quickly. As it was, he would be dead before Christmas. \u2018The festival is secure, thank God. The big push now is to get the study centre at Aldeburgh properly established,\u2019 Pears told the reporter after hanging up. It was, he said, \u2018Ben\u2019s greatest wish\u2019. <\/p>\n\n

Known today as the Britten-Pears Young Artist Programme (BPYAP), the \u2018study centre\u2019 started life in 1972, when nine singers were invited to Snape Maltings to take part in a masterclass given by Pears alongside his teacher Lucie Manen. The following 50 years have seen musicians at the beginnings of their (very often illustrious) careers come to Aldeburgh to experiment, collaborate and take risks outside the hierarchical structures of music college. BPYAP has evolved away from the confines of the masterclass format in which it began, when Pears guided the students with patrician charm through music by Schubert, Purcell and, of course, Britten. Today, it comprises courses for instrumentalists, singers and composers, as well as residencies for chamber music groups. Everything is offered free of charge, with transport and accommodation costs covered too. <\/p>\n\n

\u2018It\u2019s a testament to the opportunities we get from Britten-Pears that we\u2019re performing major roles at a venue like this,\u2019 says current Britten-Pears young artist Jolyon Loy, who will make his debut at the Royal Opera House (ROH) <\/span>Linbury Theatre in November. British baritone Loy takes up the role of Tarquinius in Britten\u2019s second opera, <\/span>The <\/em>Rape <\/em>of <\/em>Lucretia, <\/em>alongside singers from BPYAP and the ROH Jette Parker Artists Programme, with performances at Snape Maltings at the end of October before the production transfers to Covent Garden. \u2018Every company is waiting for a sign from someone else that they should take the risk and employ you,\u2019 Loy continues. \u2018Without a chance like this, it\u2019s just so hard to break through.\u2019<\/span><\/p>\n\n

New Zealand baritone Kieran Rayner stars alongside Loy as Junius, and agrees with his assessment. \u2018Once you\u2019re at the stage where you\u2019re working in the industry, everyone can do it, so something really special has to happen to get you noticed,\u2019 he says. Both singers first came to BPYAP to take part in a semi-staged production of Handel\u2019s opera Theodora, <\/em>directed by Sarah Connolly. \u2018It was one of the most fun and enriching things I\u2019ve ever done,\u2019 says Loy. \u2018Straight away, it didn\u2019t feel like a company putting on a young artist programme because it makes them look good. You could really tell that they wanted to engage and develop young talent.\u2019 For Rayner, it was the strength of Connolly\u2019s personality that made the experience so valuable. \u2018She is a force of nature,\u2019 he says. \u2018You could feel so many cogs turning all the time \u2013 it was awe-inspiring being able to watch her work.\u2019<\/span><\/p>\n\n

\u2018It\u2019s due to Britten-Pears that we\u2019re performing major Royal Opera roles\u2019 <\/span><\/p><\/blockquote>\n\n

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Guiding voice:<\/strong> Galina Vishnevskaya leads a masterclass in 1981 <\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n
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Dedicated teacher:<\/strong> Peter Pears takes a class for BPYAP in 1979 <\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n

By 1972, Britten\u2019s dwindling energies were directed into completing late masterpieces such as the opera Death <\/em>in <\/em>Venice, <\/em>the cantata Phaedra <\/em>and his Third String Quartet. He supported young artists, composers especially, throughout his life, though gave few formal lessons. Pears, on the other hand, began teaching at the Dartington Music School in Devon in the early 1950s. On holiday with the cellist Mstislav Rostropovich and soprano Galina Vishnevskaya in 1965, Pears was cajoled by them into signing a playful contract: \u2018I, Peter Pears, agree to open a music school,\u2019 it read, \u2018starting with a Summer School, and eventually for the whole year, not later than August 1966\u2019. It took a little longer than that, but things had been set in motion. <\/p>\n\n

\u2018Britten wasn\u2019t hugely involved,\u2019 says the composer\u2019s biographer Paul Kildea, who was Aldeburgh Festival director of programming between 1999 and 2002. \u2018But he wanted Pears, who was a really good teacher, to cut down on the travelling and to have something to do once he stopped singing.\u2019 The purpose-built Britten-Pears School for Advanced Musical Studies opened in 1979, paid for by a national drive in Britten\u2019s memory, and a stroke brought down the curtain on Pears\u2019s performing career the following year. He continued to teach, however, until shortly before his death six years later. <\/p>\n\n

Kildea\u2019s arrival in Aldeburgh came a year after Thomas Ad\u00e8s was appointed its artistic director. With Aldeburgh Music\u2019s then chief executive Jonathan Reekie, they set about integrating the young artist programme deeper into the festival structure. \u2018The festival after Pears died was a duumvirate of [composer] Ollie Knussen and [conductor] Steuart Bedford, and a balancing act between their different ideas and the young artist scheme was not the highest priority,\u2019 Kildea recalls. \u2018What changed was the ambition; we didn\u2019t just think of it as a bunch of these postgrad students coming together for a laugh.\u2019 No one would accuse Britten \u2013 aman of exacting tastes and occasionally brutal tendencies \u2013 of doing anything \u2018for a laugh\u2019. Pears, perhaps the warmer character, was equally clear-headed, and the enterprising spirit of today\u2019s BPYAP ref lects its founders\u2019 high standards, enthusiasm and drive. <\/p>\n\n

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A RCM weekend performance at Aldeburgh <\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n

In 2003, the Britten-Pears School for Advanced Musical Studies was reborn as the Britten Pears Young Artist Programme and began to take its present shape, with courses offered throughout the year. These often involve high-profile performances at Snape Maltings, including at the main Aldeburgh Festival each June. \u2018All of a sudden, we started putting on things like a performance of Mahler\u2019s Second Symphony at the Easter festival, which was incredibly ambitious,\u2019 Kildea recalls. His final BPYAP event was a production of Britten\u2019s <\/span>Albert <\/em>Herring <\/em>starring tenor Allan Clayton, who was then just 24. \u2018It was always so fun \u2013 we called it Britney-Spears, not Britten-Pears. There was such a sense of camaraderie, an explosion of goodwill. Everyone loved doing it.\u2019<\/span><\/p>\n\n

Although singers and pianists were the initial focus of educational activities at Snape Maltings, violist Cecil Aronowitz was appointed in 1975 to establish the Snape Maltings Chamber Orchestra, later the Britten-Pears Orchestra, as part of the programme for young artists. Violinist Maggie Faultless, who today leads the Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment (OAE), first came to Aldeburgh in the early 1980s for a piano trio course. \u2018After that I played in performances of Britten\u2019s opera Owen <\/em>Wingrave <\/em>and Bach\u2019s St <\/em>Matthew <\/em>Passion,\u2019 <\/em>she says. \u2018These experiences rooted me in the beauty of the surroundings at Aldeburgh \u2013 the gentleness and strength, which are also things people find in Britten\u2019s music.\u2019 Since then, Faultless has returned to the scheme as a tutor of Baroque performance, and with her OAE colleagues for an artistic development residency alongside the Freiburg Baroque Orchestra. Having such a long relationship with the scheme, she says, reinforces the unique feeling of community. <\/p>\n\n

\u2018There\u2019s nowhere else, certainly no secular place, that gives you the same sense that you\u2019re part of the thread of history,\u2019 Faultless continues, explaining that BPYAP\u2019s setting is unique for the sense of the past it contains. \u2018You get it walking around Westminster Abbey, knowing that Handel and Purcell worked there, but at Aldeburgh it isn\u2019t just Snape Maltings, or the Red House; it\u2019s the people, the town and the landscape that surrounds them. I know people who go to Banff [in the Canadian Rockies] describe something similar: the combination of gentleness, openness and the power of landscape.\u2019<\/span><\/p>\n\n

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Enthusiasm and drive: <\/strong>Nicholas Daniel and Roderick Williams perform for BPYAP in June 2022<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n

\u2018Nowhere else gives you the same sense that you\u2019re part of the thread of history\u2019 <\/span><\/p><\/blockquote>\n\n

Like Faultless, Royal College of Music (RCM) composition student Jasmine Morris was struck by the setting when she joined the scheme in 2021. But, as she explains, it wasn\u2019t the famous pebble beach that inspired her chamber opera, nor the whistling reeds that surround Snape Maltings. \u2018I saw these funny igloo-like structures all over the place but didn\u2019t know what they were,\u2019 she says, describing the corrugated iron huts that litter the muddy pig farms spread all over East Anglia. Morris\u2019s opera, a retelling of George Orwell\u2019s <\/span>Animal <\/em>Farm <\/em>that took this strange feature of the landscape as a starting point, was performed at this year\u2019s Aldeburgh festival alongside creations by other young artists. \u2018We had the freedom to come up with whatever ideas we wanted,\u2019 she explains. \u2018They gave us the resources we needed \u2013 expert tutors, practical support \u2013 but it was up to us to figure out how to put everything together.\u2019<\/span><\/p>\n\n

The first composers joined BPYAP in 1992, under the guidance of Knussen, who had been Britten\u2019s only real student, and Colin Matthews, his musical assistant during the 1970s. Almost three decades later, the scheme offered Morris an opportunity to take a big creative risk \u2013 writing a new opera that physically leads its audience through a number of different rooms \u2013 by putting in place what she describes as \u2018a safety net, in case we fell short\u2019. As part of the same year-long course, Rayner and fellow Britten-Pears young artist Lotte Betts-Dean gave a recital of songs by Finzi, Poulenc and Schubert that changed course each time they performed it according to votes cast by the audience. \u2018I wanted to give them some agency in what they heard,\u2019 he says. \u2018We had great feedback, and the scheme gave me the opportunity to turn something that had only ever existed in my head into reality on stage.\u2019 <\/p>\n\n

Britten, Kildea writes in the final pages of his 2013 biography, brought British music \u2018far closer to the to the Continental model of training and performance he admired in his youth and thought lacking in more slapdash Britain.\u2019 The composer\u2019s exacting, entrepreneurial spirit lives on in the Britten-Pears Young Artist Programme, as it does in the Aldeburgh Festival and, of course, the music he wrote. The pedagogical warmth and dedication the programme embodies owe more to Pears, however, and those who have followed in his wake. But whatever the origins of the Britten-Pears flame, voices from the programme\u2019s past and present make clear that it burns no less bright today than it did at that first masterclass 50 years ago. <\/p>\n\n

<\/div>
\n

Youthful ditties <\/h3>\n\n\n\n
\"\"<\/figure><\/div>\n\n\n\n

Benjamin Britten\u2019s dedication to education can be seen in the numerous works he composed for children \u2013 all of them notable in their sophisticated refusal to write \u2018down\u2019 for his young performers. Choral works include Friday <\/em>Afternoons <\/em>\u2013 12 song settings composed for the pupils of Clive House School in Wales where his brother was headmaster \u2013 and A <\/em>Ceremony <\/em>of <\/em>Carols <\/em>for soprano or treble choir, split into three parts. His operas Peter <\/em>Grimes, <\/em>The <\/em>Turn <\/em>of <\/em>the <\/em>Screw <\/em>and Owen <\/em>Wingrave <\/em>also include parts for children \u2013 and, of course, his Young <\/em>Person\u2019s <\/em>Guide <\/em>to <\/em>the <\/em>Orchestra <\/em>is a perennial favourite of budding audiences. <\/p>\n<\/div><\/section>\n\n

<\/div>
\n

From beer to there <\/h3>\n\n\n\n

Snape <\/em>Maltings <\/em>reborn <\/em><\/h6>\n\n\n\n
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Aldeburgh Music\u2019s headquarters <\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

In Britain at least, no composer and place are more closely entwined than Britten and the Suffolk coast. Born in Lowestoft, he moved with Pears to the seaside town of Aldeburgh (which had already lost much of its seagoing grit) in 1947. The first Aldeburgh Festival took place the following June, when Britten was 34 and Pears 37. A few miles inland, the derelict buildings at Snape Maltings \u2013 where barley had once taken the first steps towards becoming beer \u2013 were transformed into a concert hall two decades later and remain the headquarters of Aldeburgh Music to this day. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Britten left \u00a3100,000 (more than \u00a3800,000 today) in his will to the Britten-Pears School of Advanced Musical Studies. The subsequent appeal for funds to convert an old grain store at Snape into its permanent home raised more than five times that amount: then, as now, the Arts Council along with foundations and donors helped make up the difference. Local friends of the festival have long put up visiting artists, but the 2008 purchase of Elizabeth Court \u2013 16 studio flats in the centre of Aldeburgh \u2013 has since provided many with a home during their time with BPYAP. <\/p>\n<\/div><\/section>\n\n

PATRICK YOUNG\/NIGEL LUCKHURST\/BRITTEN PEARS ARTS\/TOM LOVATT\/GETTY\/PHILIP VILE<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Britten-Pears Art Britten\u2019s got talent\u2026 As the Britten-Pears Young Artist Programme celebrates its 50th anniversary, Tom Stewart speaks to past and present staff and students In October 1976, the tenor Peter Pears was in Canada to perform music by Benjamin Britten, his partner of 37 years. Midway through a newspaper interview, the phone rang. 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Midway through a newspaper interview, the phone rang. The…","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/c01.purpledshub.com\/bbcmusicmagazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/19606"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/c01.purpledshub.com\/bbcmusicmagazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/c01.purpledshub.com\/bbcmusicmagazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/c01.purpledshub.com\/bbcmusicmagazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/24"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/c01.purpledshub.com\/bbcmusicmagazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=19606"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/c01.purpledshub.com\/bbcmusicmagazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/19606\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":20341,"href":"https:\/\/c01.purpledshub.com\/bbcmusicmagazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/19606\/revisions\/20341"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/c01.purpledshub.com\/bbcmusicmagazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/19598"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/c01.purpledshub.com\/bbcmusicmagazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=19606"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/c01.purpledshub.com\/bbcmusicmagazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=19606"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/c01.purpledshub.com\/bbcmusicmagazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=19606"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}