Eleven years ago, conductor James Conlon had the idea for a Los Angeles-wide celebration of Benjamin Britten’s centennial. Conlon wanted to punch Britten’s music securely into the American concert repertoire, and he hoped that involving mostly young performers would help spread the word for years to come. The peak day of the celebration was Britten’s actual 100th birthday, Nov. 22, 2013, during which I followed Conlon around as he tirelessly conducted performances of the composer’s music in a number of locations.
Did all of this activity have a lasting effect in Los Angeles? Not really. In the United States, Britten’s music remains on the outskirts of the repertoire, as does most English music. His compositions are not as obscure as, say, the symphonies of Malcolm Arnold or Havergal Brian, but they’re not exactly familiar either.
So the opportunity to hear Britten’s Nocturne, Op. 60, at Walt Disney Concert Hall on Saturday, Nov. 9 — courtesy of guest conductor Daniel Harding, British tenor Andrew Staples, and members of the Los Angeles Philharmonic — was not to be missed. The LA Phil was giving its first-ever performances of this 1958 song cycle.
In a way, the neglect is understandable. Nocturne is an introspective work that sets poems by eight British poets, ranging from Shakespeare to Wilfred Owen, played in one continuous take that just occasionally rises above a pianissimo. The score is a sublime example of the composer at his most inward, using as few notes as possible to express deep musical thoughts. Britten is not afraid of dissonance when appropriate but stays resolutely tonal — and this at a time when composers had to go 12-tone to be taken seriously. Nocturne looks back to the sublime Serenade for Tenor, Horn, and Strings and ahead to parts of the War Requiem — the latter particularly in its use of a text by Owen.
Nocturne is not a surefire crowd-pleaser, nor was it meant to be, as the composer admitted. Yet this performance sure seemed to deliver — and deservedly so because Harding and company put the song cycle over masterfully.
For one thing, Harding had in Staples the perfect lyric tenor for the work. The singer illuminated the dream-laced nighttime texts at every turn, producing a plaintive timbre similar to Peter Pears, for whom the piece was written, without seeming imitative. The main thread running through the cycle is a gently rocking two-note pattern for the strings — first in the violins, then the lower strings — which the LA Phil played with breath-stopping delicacy. Another unifying thread is that each poem features one or two solo instruments on obbligato parts. First, it’s the bassoon, followed by a magical harp, a French horn, some ominous timpani, an English horn, and a flute and clarinet duo, all essayed impeccably by the orchestra’s soloists.
Harding meticulously maintained a quiet tension throughout the piece, which made the final expressionistic climax, during a sonnet by Shakespeare, all the more ferocious. The texts were projected on the rear orchestra balcony, though not the names of the poets; you had to search deeply into the program notes to find those.
Harding, once a protege of Simon Rattle who landed prestigious conducting dates while in his early 20s, has certainly gained a lot of expertise since then. He is now a seasoned 49 with a parallel career of piloting planes for Air France. (A few years ago, he said he was giving up conducting, but now he balances both professions.)
Indeed, Harding turned in a magnificently paced rendition of Richard Strauss’s expansive hymn to himself, Ein Heldenleben (A hero’s life), after intermission — giving it a big push in tempo to start, handling the battle scenes with fervor, and managing the pauses and episodes of stillness effectively and musically. Sitting concertmaster, Nathan Cole — who’s currently splitting his time between the LA Phil and the Boston Symphony — performed the solo-violin portraits of Strauss’s mercurial wife, Pauline, with a steely, flexible tone. Strauss’s spine-tingling heroics were a massive contrast to Britten’s mysterious murmurings, and Harding had it all under his assured, animated control.
