Benjamin Britten: Complete Chronological Catalogue in One Spotify Playlist

"It is cruel, you know, that music should be so beautiful. It has the beauty of loneliness and of pain: of strength and freedom. The beauty of disappointment and never-satisfied love. The cruel beauty of nature, and everlasting beauty of monotony." - Benjamin Britten

"Benjamin Britten wrote some of the most appealing classical music of the twentieth century. As a boy he began by setting favourite poems to be sung by family and friends. Later, his life partner, Peter Pears, was a singer who provided inspiration for almost four decades. So it is not surprising that Britten is best known for his music for the voice: choral works, songs and song cycles, and - above all - a series of operas among the most engaging ever written. His first success in this genre, Peter Grimes, revived opera in English. Britten was also a master of orchestral writing, as his two most familiar works, the Four Sea Interludes and Young Person's Guide to the Orchestra, make clear. He was equally committed to writing music for children and amateur performers as he was for leading soloists of the day such as cellist Mstislav Rostropovich. From the outset, Britten was the modern composer who did not want modern music to be just for 'the cultured few', and aimed always to be 'listenable-to'" - Britten-Pears Foundation

About this playlist: First I put in all the works with opus number (Op. 1-96), which were published almost strictly in the order of completion. Then I added dozens of unnumbered works (see list below), including three unused songs from Les Illuminations, and placed them in their chronological position after Britten-Pears Foundation's Britten Thematic Catalogue, which "will have catalogued all manuscript sources for both the juvenilia and the mature works by Britten's centenary in 2013".

• Quatre Chansons françaises (1928)
• Tit For Tat (1929)
• Untitled Fragment for Strings (1930)
• Quartettino (1930)
• A Hymn to the Virgin (1930, rev. 1934)
• Rondo Concertante (1930)
• String Quartet in D major (1931)
• Double Concerto in B minor (1932)
• Te Deum in C (1934)
• Two Insect Pieces (1935)
• The King's Stamp - Film score (1935)
• Coal Face - Film score (1935)
• Telegrams  - Film score (1935)
• Rossini Suite (The Tocher) - Film score (1935)
• Men Behind The Meters - Film score (1935)
• Negroes - Film score (1935)
• When You're Feeling Like Expressing Your Affection (1935)
• Three Divertimenti (1936)
• Night Mail - Film score (1936)
• Peace Of Britain (1936)
• Russian Funeral (1936)
• Around The Village Green - Film score (1936)
• Love From A Stranger - Film score (1936)
• The Way To The Sea - Film score (1936)
• Advance Democracy (1938)
• A.M.D.G (1939)
• Three unused songs from Les Illuminations (1939)
• Clarinet Concerto (unfinished) (1942)
• Folksong Arrangements, Vol. I "British Isles" (1942)
• Folksong Arrangements, Vol. II "France" (1942)
• Festival Te Deum (1944)
• Prelude and Fugue On A Theme of Vittoria (1946)
• Folksong Arrangements, Vol. III "British Isles" (1946)
• Men of Goodwill (1947)
• A Wedding Anthem (1949)
• Variation On An Elizabethan Theme (1953)
• Three Songs From The Heart of the Matter (1956)
• Folksong Arrangements, Vol. IV "Moore's Irish Melodies" (1957)
• In Memoriam Dennis Brain (1958)
• Folksong Arrangements, Vol. VI "England" (1958)
• Fanfare For St. Edmundsbury (1959)
• Folksong Arrangements, Vol. V "British Isles" (1959)
• Jubilate Deo (1961)
• The Twelve Apostles (1962)
• A Hymn of St. Columba (1962)
• Night Piece (1963)
• Untitled Piece (6 Variations) for Piano (1965)
• Children's Crusade (1969)
• Tema "Sacher" (1976)
• Lachrymae arranged for viola and small string orchestra (1976)
• Eight Folk Song Arrangements For Hight Voice and Harp (1976)

Songs from the six volumes of folksong arrangements were composed on various dates, and I used the completion date of the last song from each volume as the reference, hence Vol. 6 is placed before Vol. 5.

Here's the Spotify playlist: Benjamin Britten: Complete Chronological Catalogue (1071 tracks, total time: 62 hours) Ctrl (CMD)+G to browse in album view. It features many classic performeces by Britten & Pears, as well as other fine new recordings, like the War Requiem by Masur, the Canticles by Ian Bostridge, and Seven Sonnets of Michelangelo by Nicholas Phan. I used recordings that are available both on Spotify UK and USA when possible. See this page for text used in the vocal works.

Happy 98th birthday.

Britten Conducts Britten, And The Silently Growing Classical Catalogue On Spotify

The first search I did in Spotify was The Beatles, as for every online music service I tried, just to check it's legal status, because the Fabs' music hasn't gone digital anywhere. Then, if memory serves me right, I searched "Britten Tenor Horn". I was looking for Benjamin Britten's Serenade for Tenor, Horn and Strings (background info), one of the most heartachingly beautiful pieces of the 20th century. I was glad that I found a couple of recordings, only a wee bit disappointed that the performance conducted by Britten himself and featuring his lifelong lover, tenor Peter Pears, was not available.

From last week on, I sensed that Spotify was adding a lot of classical albums into their library, according to the official blog, 300,000 tracks of all kinds of music were added last week, but the New On Spotify page seems only show a small portion of it. I guess that record labels now even don't bother to promote their newly added classical albums by tagging them '"new". What a shame. I found both Gilels and Arrau's Beethoven piano sonatas box-set appeared on Spotify this week, probably two of the best studio recordings of the New Testament of the piano literature, and the promising debut from the Chinese pianist Yujia Wang, previously not available to the UK listeners. Last month I searched for label:Deutsche-Grammophon, only some 200 albums. Right now, 1222 albums! It's unbelievable to me that neither of Spotify and DG is promoting this update.

OK the good news, and personally the best Spotify news in a long time, is that three out of the four volumes of Britten Conducts Britten are on Spotify now! Here's the Spotify playlist: Britten Conducts Britten (572 tracks, 1.5 days). I also put in Peter Grimes and Albert Herring conducted by Britten, and I will substitute them with Vol.1 when it's available.