Britten’s The Rape of Lucretia was the first of his
operas to be recorded for the gramophone, shortly after its Glyndebourne
première in 1946 when it failed to repeat the overnight success
of Peter Grimes the previous year. At that time substantial
excerpts amounting to some two-thirds of the score were set down by
EMI on twenty sides of 78s, although Ernest Ansermet and Kathleen
Ferrier from the original first-night cast had to be replaced because
they were under exclusive contracts to Decca. Reginald Goodall and
Nancy Evans from the alternative cast did a respectable job on the
sections that were recorded, and the set was reissued on LP by Music
for Pleasure; it has subsequently reappeared on CD with an extra 78
side restored, and it remains of interest because it is the only currently
available recording which gives us the score as it was originally
written before Britten revised and cut it the following year.
After that Lucretia languished unrecorded until Britten himself
set it down in 1971, and that reading is one of the best of his series
of operas for Decca made during the period 1958-1972. It was also
the last of the operas he recorded before his ultimately fatal illness
supervened; and it enshrines a cast that is nearly perfect, headed
by Janet Baker in the title role. That recording, like the current
transcription assembled from two live concert performances from the
Aldeburgh Festival, was made in the perfect acoustic of the Snape
Maltings where the resonance of the sound lends a warmly romantic
glow to much of the music. I have not heard the later complete recording
on Chandos conducted by Richard Hickox, but I note that other reviewers
have complained that the drier and more analytical acoustic of that
recording does not present the score in the best light. Here full
advantage is taken of the opportunities to distance the voices - as
during the prologue to the Second Act - and the recording has been
assembled from two performances which presumably gave the chance to
correct any minor slips; not that I can detect any. Otherwise the
recorded sound now is slightly clearer than the Decca analogue recording
from fifty years ago, but remains very much on a par with the excellent
sound that the engineers achieved then.
In 1971 Britten had a pretty well ideal set of singers at his disposal,
only occasionally surpassed here. Where the new recording does fall
down, however, is in the lengthy opening scene - pruned by Britten
in his 1947 revision - between the three Roman generals, all lower
male voices. In 1971 Britten managed to achieve a considerable contrast
between the young, and at that time, rock-steady, voice of Benjamin
Luxon, the warmer and more sympathetic John Shirley-Quirk, and the
abrasive Bryan Drake. Although the singing in this new version is
equally fine, the contrast between the three voices is very much less
distinct, and this rather removes the element of dramatic contrast.
Without the score or text it is sometimes difficult to determine just
who is singing at any given point.
In the second scene where we move to the women’s voices, Angelika
Kirchschlager is a beautifully inflected heroine, but she lacks the
inimitable sense of loneliness and isolation that Janet Baker brought
to lines like “How quiet it is!” and “I was sure
I heard something”. On the other hand Hilary Summers is just
as characterful a Bianca as Elizabeth Bainbridge was in 1971, and
Susan Gritton floats Lucia’s quiet high lines with a sense of
beauty which surpasses the otherwise good Jenny Hill in 1971. The
folding of the linen is a real highlight of this recording, a definite
improvement on Britten’s own reading in its sense of timeless
suspension.
The other point where Britten’s recording is less than totally
ideal comes with the casting of the Male Chorus. In 1946 Peter Pears
was neatly incisive and rhythmically alert, but by 1971 his vibrato
had loosened considerably, and some of his high notes betrayed a sense
of strain although his response to the words was as careful as ever.
There are no such concerns here about Ian Bostridge, nimble in Tarquinius’s
ride and demonstrating a real and unexpected sense of power in
Go, Tarquinius! The only point at which I felt that Pears was
better came right at the end of the opera. After the Female Chorus’s
anguished protests “Is that all?” - where Susan Gritton
and Heather Harper are evenly matched for their engagement with the
vocal line and the beauty of their singing - the Male Chorus’s
response “It is not all” were floated by Pears
with a heartbreaking intensity of feeling, helped by Britten’s
slight slowing of the tempo, which is lacking here.
Although I have already observed on the lack of contrast between the
three baritone and bass voices, it must be noted that Benjamin Russell
in particular has a more sheerly attractive voice than Bryan Drake;
and that Peter Coleman-Wright as the priapic prince and Christopher
Purves as the sympathetic husband both do full justice to their roles
even if the latter lacks the bass gravitas of John Shirley-Quirk.
Knussen yields nothing whatsoever to Britten in his careful pacing
of the score, and the newer recording does enable us to hear details
that were muffled before. The orchestra, led by no less an artist
than Clio Gould, plays superlatively.
In other words, this is a tremendous recording for a new generation
of one of Britten’s most beautiful scores. Critics at the time
of the first performances complained about the wordiness of the original
libretto, but this hardly seems a problem now. Lines such as “The
oatmeal slippers of sleep” have a beautiful resonance which
some of Britten’s more workaday librettos such as Gloriana
conspicuously lack; it is not surprising that the text, drawn from
a French play by André Obey, also attracted such a different
composer as Respighi, whose posthumous Lucrezia makes a fascinating
contrast to Britten’s cooler and more objective setting.
The booklet contains a useful essay by Colin Matthews - reprinted
from the Aldeburgh Festival programme - which makes some pertinent
observations about Britten’s 1947 revisions to the score as
well as the complete text and synopsis. While regretting the disappearance
of Collatinus’s aria “Love is all desperation” from
the first scene (Lucretia quotes from it during the rape scene), it
is clear that Britten felt that his tightening up of the score was
an advantage, and given the small number of recordings of the score
it is obviously desirable that Britten’s preferred version should
be adhered to. In a similar vein, the restoration of the muster scene
in Billy Budd - cut by Britten in his revision - which has
been made in some recent recordings does not always work to the score’s
advantage.
In the end, however, Britten’s fifty-year-old recording still
reigns supreme as an interpretation of this beautiful work. Apart
from the superlative Janet Baker the rest of Britten’s cast
yields little or nothing to the singers here. There have been pirates
available of early performances with Kathleen Ferrier, but from what
I recall of these the recorded sound is pretty abysmal, and Baker
is even better than the young and at the time still relatively inexperienced
Ferrier in her response to the text. The Decca set also contains a
‘filler’ - which none of the alternative versions do -
in the shape of the scena Phaedra which Britten wrote for Janet
Baker at about the same time. As a work it has not always found favour
with critics, but it complements an invaluable conspectus of the contribution
of Baker to the Britten discography.
Paul Corfield Godfrey
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Britten discography
