It's very hard to tell from the packaging what one is getting with this group of hitherto unrecorded music by Benjamin Britten. The subtitle "Music for Radio and Theatre" is ambiguous; included are two sets of incidental music for plays and one group of excerpts from a six-part radio series, An American in England, that is less a drama than a propaganda broadcast. (There are also two blues songs as intermezzi, one of them drawn from a lost larger work.) The title Britten to America is downright inaccurate; none of the music ...
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It's very hard to tell from the packaging what one is getting with this group of hitherto unrecorded music by Benjamin Britten. The subtitle "Music for Radio and Theatre" is ambiguous; included are two sets of incidental music for plays and one group of excerpts from a six-part radio series, An American in England, that is less a drama than a propaganda broadcast. (There are also two blues songs as intermezzi, one of them drawn from a lost larger work.) The title Britten to America is downright inaccurate; none of the music was written during Britten's stint in the U.S. during the first part of World War II, and the two pieces of theatrical incidental music, The Ascent of F6 and On the Frontier, were composed in 1936 and 1937, before he had any idea he'd be crossing the Atlantic. They have nothing to do with America; one is about mountaineering, while the other is an allegorical treatment of the rise of fascism. So, for those interested in an album exploring Britten's relationship with the American...
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