Benjamin Britten

* The Rescue of Penelope
* Phaedra*

Janet Baker (narrator), Alison Hagley (soprano), Catherine Wyn-Rogers
(mezzo), John Mark Ainsley (tenor), William Dazeley (bass)
*Lorraine Hunt (soprano)
Halle Orchestra/Kent Nagano
Total time: 51:00
Erato 0630-12713-2.

Summary for the Busy Executive: A fabled Rescue; a less-than-tragic
heroine.

Listening to The Rescue of Penelope, I wondered how such powerful and
beautiful music had gone unknown by the general public (in which I count
myself) for so long.  It comes from the early Forties, when the composer's
idiom acquired probably its most warmly sensual form.  Britten for good
reason has become one of the most popular of modern composers, with bona
fide hits, and record companies are beginning to mine the forgotten corners
of his catalogue in the hope of striking gold yet again.  It constitutes
a hedged risk.  If the world ran on merit, Erato would be rewarded.

The version performed here has a complicated history.  Britten
originally wrote it as incidental music for a BBC radio play by Edward
Sackville-West, on Odysseus's homecoming and slaying of Penelope's suitors.
However, Britten's status as a conscientious objector during World War II
had raised hackles within the BBC and apparently among several music
critics.  Britten was so disgusted with the internal politics of the
BBC that, after completing the music as a gesture of friendship to
Sackville-West, he withdrew from the project.  The performance, badly
rehearsed, did not receive a friendly critical reception, and it seemed
fated to sink without a trace.  However, Chris de Souza (apparently, he
did most of the work), Colin Matthews (who made minimal, invisible musical
changes in the adaptation), and Donald Mitchell reshaped the piece into
a concert version which has indeed had the occasional performance.  This,
however, is its premiere recording, over fifty years after its composition.

The music is flat-out gorgeous - every note golden.  I can't think of a
weak or routine moment in the entire score.  The liner notes point out
favorite passages, but that's almost beside the point.  Like the Odyssey
itself, The Rescue of Penelope impresses as a whole.  It defies belief that
Britten wrote to a fairly tight deadline.  The music finds its way directly
to the listener's heart in almost severely economic gestures, but the tone
is above all warm and singing.  The score abounds in memorable themes and
coups de theatre.  The music depicting Odysseus's lone boat on the Aegean
reminds us that Peter Grimes is just around the corner, as does the
arpeggiated melos given to the singers, portraying Athene, Artemis, Hermes,
and Apollo.  The trumpet call associated with Athene, the theme of
Penelope's longing - in effect, an instrumental aria, and from the
saxophone, yet!  - a neat, apparently effortless canon in two and then
three parts, the depiction of Odysseus's transformation into an old man
by the goddess Athene, and the slaying of the twelve suitors by the twelve
arrows from the hero's bow constitute a mere fraction of memorable moments
in this score - all strongly communicative and strikingly "visual" in their
affect.  Britten gives the impression of wielding a Fortunatus sack of
invention, and without breaking a sweat.

In its new form, the work is largely melodrama - that is, music
underscoring a speaker.  The text comes mainly from the Sackville-West
play (mostly speeches given to Athene), with minimal interpolations from
the Homeric source.  Melodrama usually falls into two distinct traps:
either the text shoves the music into the background (in which case, why
have the music at all?) or the music is so good that you lose the import of
the spoken text and hence the subject of the musical depiction.  It's the
latter case here.  A stronger reader than Janet Baker might have made a
better case for the work, but hearing her again, even in a non-singing
part, gladdens me immensely.  One of my favorite British singers - maybe
my second favorite after Ferrier - she brings great Britten credentials,
having recorded both Lucretia and Phaedra, which Britten wrote specifically
for her.  Unfortunately, the drama of her singing doesn't carry over to
her spoken declamation.  Nevertheless, a fabulous work, long overdue for
recording.

Phaedra, on the other hand, comes from Britten's late period, after his
first heart attack, when the work of composing had become physically and
psychologically hard for him.  Nevertheless, he persevered, wanting to
write this work specifically for Janet Baker, who made a classic recording
for British Decca (London 25666).  By this time, Britten had moved from
a personal refashioning of Stravinskian, triad-based neo-classicism to a
spikier chromaticism.  He models the work on the Handelian cantata using
the building blocks of recitative and aria, with a near-Handelian orchestra
of strings and harpsichord.  He does add some discreet percussion.  In
short, it reminds me very strongly of Handel's "Armida abbandonata," also,
incidentally, recorded by Baker.  Britten took his text from Robert
Lowell's translation of Racine's Phedre, the scene where the woman, through
her lust responsible for the death of her innocent stepson at the hand of
his father, Theseus, drinks poison and confesses all.  The recitatives, in
the manner of similar sections of Britten's Canticles, move to the prose
rhythms of the text, cutting across metrical and rhyming boundaries in
freely-associative sequences.  Britten emphasizes Phaedra's psychological
turnings.  The arias, equally dramatic, nevertheless follow more
aurally-coherent musical structures.  Indeed, Britten has tamed the
pentameter and Alexandrines of Lowell's verse to what the ear accepts
as "natural" musical phrases.  But this is merely cold admiration for
technique.  With the right performers, this should be a shattering work.

Under Britten and Baker, that's exactly what it was.  Baker pushed
dramatic limits without hamming it up, and Britten's strings stung and
slashed.  The diction, always Baker's weak point, wasn't bad enough to mar
the drama - in other words, the cantata's point.  Lorraine Hunt is far more
intelligible to less effect.  Nagano turns in a clean, crisp performance
but doesn't rise above thoroughly professional.  The Rescue of Penelope
comes off far better, even though the singers are close to incomprehensible
at least two-thirds of the time.  The orchestra and the ensemble become
the stars.  Nagano fully responds to the theatricality and even movie-like
sweep of the score, getting beautiful sounds from everybody and
simultaneously moving the matter along.  The score gleams like warm,
burnished gold.

The recording sounds almost eerily clear.  You feel as if you could pick
out each instrumentalist.  In all, one of the most important releases of
British music in the last few years, with at least one marvelous
performance.

Steve Schwartz