Though Benjamin Britten recorded a good proportion of his own works, both as pianist and conductor, there are some notable gaps, two of which - the early cantata, Our Hunting Fathers and the extended viola piece, Lachrymae - are filled here in the first of these very welcome issues in the Britten the Performer series.
Britten's Op. 8, Our Hunting Fathers, created something of a scandal when it was first performed at the Norwich Festival in 1936. In the face of a commission from such a source, it was deliberately provocative of Britten's collaborator, W. H. Auden, to choose an anti-blood sports theme in his texts, and the composer in his interpretation here, biting and urgent to the point of violence in climaxes, reflects what he must have felt in writing the work. Pears is in superb voice too, focused sharply in this rather dry mono BBC studio recording of 1961. That also adds to the bite of the reading.
In Lachrymae, not so much a set of variations on the Dowland theme as a series of episodic reflections, the playing of Britten at the piano helps enormously in holding a tricky work together. It is a case of the creator himself magnetizing the ear almost as if it were an improvisation, with Margaret Major characteristically warm in her beautifully sustained reading - an artist well remembered for her superb contributions to the vintage Aeolian Quartet.
Though Britten and Pears recorded for Decca the late song-cycle, Who are these children?, soon after it was first performed in 1971, that recording is still absent from the CD catalogue, making this another important gap-filler. With its clutch of brief nursery-rhyme settings in the Scots dialect (the texts were written by William Soutar), it may initially seem a relatively lightweight piece, but they only serve to intensify by contrast the darkness of the four more substantial war-inspired songs. Here again in the title-song Britten takes an antihunting theme, as part of his (and Soutar's) more general message on innocent children as victims in a wicked world. Again there is violence in this performance, with both Britten and Pears at their finest. It is good too to have this 1956 Aldeburgh Festival account of the Canticle No. 3 with Dennis Brain as horn soloist. The acoustic of Aldeburgh Church may be dry, but the warmth of singer and accompanist is vividly caught.
The major drawback to this issue is the absence of texts, and that is a flaw too in the other issue, not just in Britten's Nocturne but equally in the varied texts in Russian of Shostakovich's Symphony No. 14. This was the symphony which Shostakovich dedicated to Britten, and this Maltings performance conducted by Britten was the very first outside Russia, a monumental event as I remember myself. Galina Vishnevskaya's sharply distinctive soprano has rarely sounded so rich or firmly focused on disc, and the bass, Mark Rezhetin, firm and dark, sings gloriously too. The tensions of a live performance add to the drama of a piece on the theme of death, poignantly so, when, as we now know, both Britten and Shostakovich were facing terminal illness.
The Nocturne makes an ideal filler in this vivid live performance. Compared with his 1959 studio recording for Decca, Pears here sounds warmer and sweeter, balanced a little backwardly and so set against a helpful ambience. The soloists in each song, by contrast, are more closely balanced than in the Decca recording, adding to the impact of such a song as the Wordsworth with its terrifying timpani obbligato superbly played here by James Blades. Indeed, all the solo instrumentalists here are even more attuned to Britten's idiom than their LSO counterparts on Decca, who, in tackling what was then a brand new work, sound a degree less flexible. These radio recordings from different sources inevitably bring contrasted sound, but all the transfers are first-rate.'