Article: Music Britten Songs Wigmore Hall, London

A notable Aldeburgh Festival programme from a quarter of a century ago was touchingly recreated in the first of two recitals given on Tuesday as part of the Wigmore Hall's festival of The Britten Songs. That original programme occasioned the premiere of Britten's Canticle IV, a setting of TS Eliot's "Journey of the Magi". It is a work of the utmost concentration whose opening proposition is extended and developed with a spare ingenuity that uncannily matches the poem's terse vernacular. If the austere musical narrative lacks the persuasive warmth of, say, Canticle II: "Abraham and Isaac", which also featured in the programme, there is a sharpness of focus that compels attention throughout, ...

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