Tuning up for Britten's centenary

Over the next two weeks, Dunedin is hosting the southernmost festival celebrating the centenary of British composer Benjamin Britten's birth.

Organised by Tessa Petersen and Judy Bellingham, executant lecturers in violin and voice at the University of Otago, it features performances, illustrated lectures and a rehearsed reading of The Habit of Art, a play by Alan Bennett about the meeting of Britten and poet W.H. Auden, former friends who had fallen out 25 years previously.

Britten (1913-76) was the most significant British composer of the mid-20th century and wrote an extraordinary range of works, from folksong settings and choral and chamber works for children to complex orchestral pieces, operas and choral works, Petersen said.

According to Bellingham, there had been a renaissance of choral music at the beginning of the 20th century led by composers such as Parry, Stanford, Elgar and Vaughan Williams, and Britten took over from them.

Britten's life partner was tenor Peter Pears, for whom he wrote numerous vocal works and many opera roles, including Albert Herring and Peter Grimes in the operas of the same name. Britten was a fine pianist and always accompanied Pears, Bellingham said.

The couple went to the US in 1939 when World War 2 started, but later returned to England and settled in Aldeburgh, Suffolk. They started the Aldeburgh festival there in 1948. The Dunedin festival, which opens tomorrow evening, is sponsored by an award from the Britten-Pears Foundation.

It includes a concert of works for children featuring the Southern Children's Choir, another of choral music featuring the Southern Youth Choir, the Southern Consort of Voices and the St Paul's Cathedral Choir, a choral matins, two concerts of chamber music performed by university performance staff and guests, and illustrated lectures on the Irish and Scottish folk song arrangements, another on Britten's operas, and a rehearsed play reading.