Britten: Owen Wingrave

Opera no 3

Britten: Owen Wingrave

Soloists

City of London Sinfonia

Richard Hickox

Britten’s Owen Wingrave was first broadcast when I was still at school. I have a vague memory of seeing a little bit of the opera but in those days there was only one television set in the house of course, and a full-length Britten opera would have been too much for the family. Since then I have listened to/seen all of the Britten operas except for this one. 

It is a late piece so, as is typical of the composer’s work of this period, the textures are often very thin with absence of the big ensemble pieces that feature in works like Peter Grimes and Billy Budd. Much of the music is in fact almost recitative like though there are some fully developed areas, especially Owen Wingrave’s set piece in Act 2. Britten’s later style fingerprints are all over the score. Distant trumpets, a boys chorus, plenty of isolated phrases in the percussion section and especially the gamelan-like sonorities  which Britten had grown more and more interested in since The Prince of the Pagodas. 

I’m not sure how the whole opera stands up. The libretto seems quite naive and some of the phraseology seems quaint and old fashioned. And some of Britten’s quirks become very tiresome., particularly word repetition. At one point the repetition of the word ‘scruples’ seems almost comic.

Yet for all of this there is some very hunting music in this score. Some of the ensemble writing for women’s voices is very haunting and brings to mind the Do we smile or do we weep ensemble in Peter Grimes. The end is genuinely moving.

The role of old Sir Philip Wingrave was written for Peter Pears. On this recording is was sung by Robin Leggate. He was not trying to imitate Pears but his performance had the unmistakable aura of Peter Pears. That is a sign of how at this stage Britten was so familiar with every nuance of Pear’s voice that he instinctively wrote music that fitted his his vocal personality like a glove.