Benjamin Britten - Piano Concerto; Diversions; Young Apollo (Steven Osborne)

Information

Composer: Benjamin Britten

• (01-04) Piano Concerto in D major, Op. 13
• (05) Original version of the third movement of the Piano Concerto: Recitative and Aria: Lento
• (06) Young Apollo, for piano, string quartet and string Orchestra, Op. 16
• (07-19) Diversions, for piano (left hand) and orchestra, Op. 21

Steven Osborne, piano
BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra
Ilan Volkov, conductor

Date: 2008
Label: Hyperion
http://www.hyperion-records.co.uk/dc.asp?dc=D_CDA67625

----------------------------------------------------------------------------

Review

GRAMOPHONE AWARD WINNER 2009 - CONCERTO CATEGORY

A great case made for Britten’s piano works, and a pianist to challenge Richter

Commissioned as a 24-year-old to compose and perform a piano concerto for the 1938 Proms, Britten played safe. None of the edginess he might have filched from Bartók or Stravinsky, no Bergian angst: instead, the models are Prokofiev, Shostakovich and Ravel, and in these terms he doesn’t miss a trick, at least before the finale’s rather perfunctory final gallop. Most of the piece takes a genuinely fresh look at pianistic conventions, and Steven Osborne yields nothing to the great Sviatoslav Richter in the punchiness and fine-tuned filigree of his playing. No skating over the surface here, with Ilan Volkov and the BBC Scottish SO adept at teasing out the music’s symphonic subtext, as well as its piquant orchestral effects.

Britten replaced the original slow movement in 1945, possibly because it spent too much time in waltz-like regions already visited in the second movement. This disc adds it anyway, alongside two other scores for piano and orchestra. Young Apollo (1939) was not heard for half a century after its premiere, perhaps discarded by Britten because its fanfare-like material was more effectively deployed in Les illuminations (also 1939). It’s a quirky piece, difficult to programme, a euphorically unguarded response to Keats’s vision of male beauty in Hyperion.

Diversions is on a much grander scale, its style making even clearer those debts to Mahler which Britten had allowed to surface now and again in the concerto. The multifarious challenges to the single-handed soloist create moments of strong emotional depth and, as throughout the disc, Osborne and his colleagues make the best possible case for pieces which have tended to be placed on the outer fringes of the Britten canon. The recordings, made in Glasgow’s Henry Wood Hall, have ample depth of sonority and vividness of colour.

-- Arnold Whittall, Gramophone

More reviews:
MusicWeb International  RECORDING OF THE MONTH
BBC Music Magazine  PERFORMANCE: **** / SOUND: ****
ClassicsToday  ARTISTIC QUALITY: 10 / SOUND QUALITY: 9
http://www.classicalsource.com/db_control/db_cd_review.php?id=6228
https://www.theguardian.com/music/2008/aug/29/classicalmusicandopera
http://www.allmusic.com/album/britten-piano-concerto-diversions-young-apollo-mw0001581905
https://www.amazon.com/Britten-Piano-Concerto-Diversions-Apollo/dp/B001CJYJQY

----------------------------------------------------------------------------

Benjamin Britten (22 November 1913 – 4 December 1976) was an English composer, conductor and pianist. He was a central figure of 20th-century British classical music, with a range of works including opera, other vocal music, orchestral and chamber pieces. Over the next 28 years, he wrote 14 more operas, establishing himself as one of the leading 20th-century composers in the genre. Britten's other works range from orchestral to choral, solo vocal, chamber and instrumental as well as film music. Britten was also a celebrated pianist and conductor, performing many of his own works in concert and on record.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Benjamin_Britten

***

Steven Osborne (born 1971) is a Scottish pianist. He was taught by Richard Beauchamp at St Mary's Music School in Edinburgh before going to the Royal Northern College of Music in Manchester to study under Renna Kellaway. His recording career began when he was signed to Hyperion Records in 1998 and has resulted in bi-annual recordings. Steven Osborne has returned almost annually to the BBC Proms. At the Edinburgh Festival he has appeared both as a soloist and chamber musician.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steven_Osborne_(pianist)
http://www.stevenosborne.co.uk/

----------------------------------------------------------------------------

FLAC, tracks

Links in comment

Enjoy!