Plymouth Town is a ballet composed by Benjamin Britten in 1931. A typical performance lasts about 25 minutes. [1]
It was written between the 12 and 28 August and completed on 22 November 1931, shortly after Britten's first year as a student at the Royal College of Music. [2] [3] Britten's score is based on the sea shanty "A Roving". The folklorist Violet Alford devised the plot of the ballet. [3] Paul Kildea describes the plot as a "quayside morality tale". [4] The plot of the ballet concerns a sailor led astray by a 'bad girl' who was a "mistress of her trade" as described in "A Roving"; she robs the sailor after the two embark on a pub crawl. The plot was later echoed in Britten's opera Albert Herring . [5] [6] Plymouth Town was never performed in Britten's lifetime. He sent the score without success to the Camargo Society, a prominent promoter of British ballet. [3] Britten's biographer David Matthews notes the influence of Gustav Mahler on the orchestration of the ballet, a note on the score instructs the horns and clarinets to play "bells up"; an indication that would have only been seen by Britten on the scores of Mahler's symphonies. [7]
John Bridcut describes the piece as a "fascinating harbinger of the mature Britten" with "moments of wit and poignancy, all delivered with an angular energy". [6]
It was first performed at the Royal College of Music, London on 25 January 2004. [1] The sole recording of Plymouth Town was made by the BBC Symphony Orchestra in 2005. [6] The ballet was staged for the first time on 1 July 2013 by Chethams's School of Music under conductor Jeremy Pike with dancers from The Hammond Dance School with choreography by Jane Elliot at the Opera Theatre of the Royal Northern College of Music in Manchester. [2]
Edward Benjamin Britten, Baron Britten was an English composer, conductor, and pianist. He was a central figure of 20th-century British music, with a range of works including opera, other vocal music, orchestral and chamber pieces. His best-known works include the opera Peter Grimes (1945), the War Requiem (1962) and the orchestral showpiece The Young Person's Guide to the Orchestra (1945).
Sir Alan Charles Maclaurin Mackerras was an Australian conductor. He was an authority on the operas of Janáček and Mozart, and the comic operas of Gilbert and Sullivan. He was long associated with the English National Opera and Welsh National Opera and was the first Australian chief conductor of the Sydney Symphony Orchestra.
Deryck Cooke was a British musician, musicologist, broadcaster and Gustav Mahler expert.
Imogen Clare Holst was a British composer, arranger, conductor, teacher, musicologist, and festival administrator. The only child of the composer Gustav Holst, she is particularly known for her educational work at Dartington Hall in the 1940s, and for her 20 years as joint artistic director of the Aldeburgh Festival. In addition to composing music, she wrote composer biographies, much educational material, and several books on the life and works of her father.
Saint Nicolas, Op. 42, is a cantata with music by Benjamin Britten on a text by Eric Crozier, completed in 1948. It covers the legendary life of Saint Nicholas, Bishop of Myra, Lycia, in a dramatic sequence of events. The composer wrote the work for the centenary of Lancing College in Sussex, with the resources of the institution in mind. It is scored for mixed choir, tenor soloist, four boys singers, strings, piano duet, organ and percussion. The only professionals required are the tenor soloist, a string quintet to lead the other strings, and the percussionists. Saint Nicolas is Britten's first work for amateur musicians, and it includes congregational hymns. The premiere was the opening concert of the first Aldeburgh Festival in June 1948, with Peter Pears as the soloist.
Colin Matthews, OBE is an English composer of classical music.
James Michael Bernard was a British film composer, particularly associated with horror films produced by Hammer Film Productions. Starting with The Quatermass Xperiment, he scored such classic films as The Curse of Frankenstein and Dracula. He also occasionally scored non-Hammer films including Windom's Way (1957) and Torture Garden (1967).
David Matthews is an English composer of mainly orchestral, chamber, vocal and piano works.
Noye's Fludde is a one-act opera by the British composer Benjamin Britten, intended primarily for amateur performers, particularly children. First performed on 18 June 1958 at that year's Aldeburgh Festival, it is based on the 15th-century Chester "mystery" or "miracle" play which recounts the Old Testament story of Noah's Ark. Britten specified that the opera should be staged in churches or large halls, not in a theatre.
Britten's Children is a scholarly 2006 book by John Bridcut that describes the English composer Benjamin Britten's relationship with several adolescent boys. Bridcut has been praised for treating such a sensitive subject in "an impeccably unsensational tone". The Britten-Pears Foundation described the book as having been "enthusiastically received as shedding new light on one of the most interesting aspects of Britten's life and career, in a study that is thoroughly researched, wonderfully readable and thought-provoking". Bridcut's book followed his television documentary Britten's Children shown on BBC2 in June 2004.
Donald Charles Peter Mitchell CBE was a British writer on music, particularly known for his books on Gustav Mahler and Benjamin Britten and for the book The Language of Modern Music, published in 1963.
The Wandering Scholar, Op. 50 is a chamber opera in one act by the English composer Gustav Holst, composed 1929–30. The libretto, by Clifford Bax, is based on the book The Wandering Scholars by Helen Waddell.
The Company of Heaven is a composition for soloists, speakers, choir, timpani, organ, and string orchestra by Benjamin Britten. The title refers to angels, the topic of the work, reflected in texts from the Bible and by poets. The music serves as incidental music for a mostly spoken radio feature which was first heard as a broadcast of the BBC in 1937.
Friday Afternoons is a collection of 12 song settings by Benjamin Britten, composed 1933–35 for the pupils of Clive House School, Prestatyn, where his brother, Robert, was headmaster. Two of the songs, "Cuckoo" and "Old Abram Brown", were featured in the film Moonrise Kingdom.
Sophie Adele Wyss was a Swiss soprano who made her career as a concert singer and broadcaster in the UK. She was noted for her performances of French works, many of them new to Britain, for giving the world premieres of Benjamin Britten's orchestral song cycles Our Hunting Fathers (1936) and Les Illuminations (1940), and for encouraging other composers to set English and French texts. Among those who wrote for her were Lennox Berkeley, Arnold Cooke, Roberto Gerhard, Elizabeth Maconchy, Peter Racine Fricker, Alan Rawsthorne and Mátyás Seiber.
Clytie May Hine, was an Australian-born operatic soprano who became a renowned voice teacher in New York.
Benjamin Britten's Sinfonietta was composed in 1932, at the age of 18, while he was a student at the Royal College of Music. It was first performed in 1933 at The Ballet Club, London conducted by Iris Lemare. It was published as his Op. 1 and dedicated to his teacher Frank Bridge.
The Golden Vanity is a musical setting of an adaptation by Colin Graham of a traditional folk song, also known as "The Sweet Trinity", for boys' voices and piano by the English composer Benjamin Britten (1913–76). The composer described it as a vaudeville. The boys act out parts as well as sing; Britten wrote on the score: "The Vaudeville should be given in costume but without scenery ... The action ... should be mimed in a simple way and only a few basic properties, such as telescopes and a rope, are needed ... A drum should be used for the sound of cannon fire".
Children's Crusade, Op. 82, subtitled a Ballad for children's voices and orchestra is a composition by Benjamin Britten. He completed it in 1969, setting Bertolt Brecht's poem Kinderkreuzzug 1939 for children's choir with some solo parts, keyboard instruments and an array of percussion, to be performed mainly by children. It was first performed in an English version at St Paul's Cathedral in London on 19 May 1969.
Beware! Three Early Songs is a song cycle for voice and piano composed by Benjamin Britten and set to texts by Herbert Asquith, Robert Burns and Henry Wadsworth Longfellow.