Symphony for Cello and Orchestra, Op. 68 Each of the four creative periods of Britten’s prolific career culminated in a major large-scale work. His full maturity was signalled by Peter Grimes (1945), the second and third creative periods ended with the War Requiem (1961) and Death in Venice (1973), and his brief Indian summer flowered in one of his very finest chamber works, the Third String Quartet. The two works featured on this disc frame his third creative period.
After the War Requiem Britten embarked on a period of experimentation and expansion of techniques – a period that saw the composition of some of his most original works: the Cantata Misericordium, the Three Church Parables, the Songs and Proverbs of William Blake and A Poet’s Echo. Two considerable masterpieces belong to these years, Curlew River (the first of the Parables) and the Symphony for Cello and Orchestra
The Cello Symphony was completed in May 1963 and was one of a series of works (including the Sonata in C and three suites for unaccompanied cello) that Britten composed for, and dedicated to, Mstislav Rostropovich. It was the first purely instrumental work of such imposing scale that Britten had composed since the early 1940s. The opening D minor Allegro maestoso is also Britten’s most substantial sonata-allegro in terms of scale and content. The contrapuntal G minor scherzo (Presto inquieto) exploits a three-note scalic motif contained within a minor third. Thirds also predominate in the intense, elegiac Adagio, in which the principal theme is constructed entirely from a descending sequence of melodic thirds. The second subject, shared between the cello and solo horn, anticipates the Passacaglia finale, where the trumpet tune (shades of Prokofiev and Janáˇcek) is subjected to six variations and a coda over a ground bass.
The most important distinction to be made between Britten’s early concertos and the Cello Symphony is in the relationship between the soloist and the orchestra. Whereas in the bravura Piano Concerto (1938) and even in the more intense Violin Concerto (1939) the soloist assumes the traditional stance, being removed from and in dramatic conflict with the orchestra, in the Cello Symphony the soloist is a virtuosic yet integral part of a coherent symphonic design. The relationship is that which Britten had already explored in the Sonata for Cello and Piano that he had composed for Rostropovich in 1960.
An age-old problem in writing for the cello as a solo instrument in the context of a full symphony orchestra is the difficulty of balancing the textures in such a way that the soloist can be heard. But the cello’s most expressive range is that which corresponds with the tessitura of the tenor voice, and Britten certainly knew how to discipline orchestral forces to allow the tenor voice to carry without force. A remarkable feature of the orchestration of the Cello Symphony is the melodic importance of the bass-Iine and the upper woodwind. The middle register of the orchestra is freed for the soloist. In this respect the orchestral palettes of the Cello Symphony and Death in Venice (whose principal protagonist, Gustav von Aschenbach, is sung by a tenor) have a great deal in common.
