Rare Repertoire Worthy of A Hearing

This is definitely one of the more unusual of the BBC Music mag cover disks. For a start it features a first ever recording of a work by Britten which given the place he holds in 20th century British music must be surprising. The piece in question is Plymouth Town, written as ballet music by the teenage Britten and already showing the influence of the sea which was to permeate through his entire career, even if Plymouth is geographically a little removed from his native east coast. The story is a rather more genteel version of something like the Miraculous Mandarin, with a drunken sailor on shore leave being taken advantage of by the "Bad Girl". Much of the scoring is in the vein of his work for documentary film and the sea shanty A-Roving plays a prominent part. Not a major discovery but worth a place in the recorded annals which it is given here by the BBC Symphony Orchestra conducted by Grant Llewellyn. The other Britten piece on the disk is Nocturne, played by the BBC National Orchestra of Wales under Douglas Bostock with tenor Andrew Kennedy. Kennedy is going through the Radio 3 New Generation Artist scheme and it seems a rite of passage for any aspiring young English tenor to tackle the Britten / Pears repertoire. The settings here are certainly from premier league sources such as Shelley, Tennyson, Coleridge, Keats, Wordsworth, Wilfred Owen and that upstart Shakespeare. The orchestrations are typical Britten. The disk concludes with more rare repertoire, Ballads For Orchestra by Grace Williams played by the BBC Symphony Orchestra conducted by Baldur Bronnimann. Very interesting colours, timbres and textures with 20th century flavours from jazz, bluesy chords and a hint of the east in the writing. Much could be written about the dearth of major female composers, I admit to an almost total lack of knowledge of Grace Williams's work but would seek out more after hearing this.