Enjoy this exceptional performance of Britten's masterwork from the opening concert of our 2018 season. MTT breathes new life into this seminal work with the help of the New World Symphony Fellows.

Benjamin Britten had a precocious start in music, studying piano and viola and composing hundreds of works by the time he was a teenager. After graduating from the Royal Conservatory of Music in 1932, he began to make professional inroads in England, and a long visit the United States during World War II helped him clarify his musical and personal outlook. His traveling companion, the tenor Peter Pears, became his lifelong romantic partner and also a peerless interpreter; with Pears singing the title role of Peter Grimes in 1945, Britten’s debut opera placed the 31-year-old composer at the forefront of British music.

After the success of Peter Grimes, the British Ministry of Education commissioned Britten to write an orchestral work to be used in an educational video. It was fitting that he borrowed source material from Henry Purcell (1659-1695), the most significant composer of English theater music before Britten. Extracting a theme from the incidental music for the play Abdelazer, composed exactly 250 years earlier, Britten developed a set of variations to feature subsets of the orchestra, culminating in a final fugue. The resulting work, The Young Person’s Guide to the Orchestra, has earned a rightful reputation as one of the most beloved gateways into classical music, in a rare class with Prokofiev’s Peter and the Wolf and Saint-Saëns’ Carnival of the Animals.

-- Copyright @ 2018 Aaron Grad

Originally performed October 20, 2018.