Musicatlas
Portrait of Benjamin Britten by Paul Helm
News for Britten
- “The Red House” of Britten/Pears to become visitor center
[posted 30 March 2010]The Britten 100 project has received support from the Heritage Lottery Fund to develop the 17th century “The Red House”, in which Benjamin Britten lived with his partner, the tenor Peter Pears.
The Britten 100 project aims, among other things, to open the house, its collections and Britten's composition studio as never before.
Britten and Pears lived in “The Red House”, Aldeburgh, between 1956 and 1976. In 2013, when the 100th birthday of Britten will be celebrated, the project should be finished.
[Source: www.edp24.co.uk]
- Britten composition discovered after 69 years
[posted 1 March 2006]A till now lost Britten composition was found back by film maker John Mappleback in Great Britain after a 15 year search. In 1937 Benjamin Britten composed the "Roman Wall Blues" for a live radio documentary on a text by W. Auden. The piece is about a bored Roman soldier at Hadrian's Wall, on the border of Scotland and England. After a casual conversation with a 99 year old former employee of the Bank of England, the music turned up again. In this year's Aldeburgh Festival the "Roman Wall Blues" will be heard again for the first time since 1937. [source: The Guardian]
- Matthus "Te Deum" opens Dresdens Frauenkirche
[posted 6 November 2005]German composer Siegfried Matthus has written a "Te Deum" that will be premiered in Dresden's newly renovated Frauenkirche on 11 November 2005. This church was destroyed at the end of World War II during allied attacks. The German conductor Kurt Masur already compared the piece with Benjamin Britten's War Requiem, composed for Coventry Cathedral in England, which was bombed by the Germans in the same war.