Naxos to release Cecilia's recording of "The Construction of Boston."
The CD of Composer in Residence Scott Wheeler's opera will be released during 2008. The libretto, as well as program notes from the April 2007 concert performance, are available now.

"Teeters and his classy cast and players offered the first truly satisfying performance I’ve heard... If I ever forget what a superb programmer he's been over his 39 years of directing Boston Cecilia, remind me of this concert."

-Lloyd Schwartz, The Boston Phoenix, Apr. 5, 2007. Read the review!

Introducing New Music: Recent and Right Now, presenting the music of up-and-coming composers, in collaboration with Scott Wheeler. Annual series debuts in June 2008!

Benjamin Britten's place in twentieth-century music is still being assessed. He was recognized early on as the possessor of an extraordinary gift. Most would name him the greatest English composer since Purcell and the first great indigenous English opera composer. Some critics and colleagues have faulted Britten's choice to chart his own course rather than buy into the more fashionable musical trends of the century. Audiences and performers generally — those who have not found it necessary to man the barricades — have been unconflicted in this regard. For them, his music, even after repeated exposure, continues to move and inspire, and seems ever new and necessary. Maybe we have now arrived at a time when to celebrate Britten does not require a corresponding condemnation of the serialists, and vice versa. It was not always the case. One must rue an artistic climate — hardly exclusive to the 20th century — that insists on irrelevant comparisons in the arts. Must one despise Brahms to adore Wagner?

Britten took delight in a familiar, commonly understood language of sound as it had evolved over the centuries. He developed a personal vocabulary within that language that is unmistakably his own, marking his music as unquestionably of our time, rooted but original. He had no desire to ostracize C major, but his C major sounds like no one else's. Generally speaking, Britten's music finds a home in the heart and the head in roughly equal shares. Like a great raconteur, Britten could coin a phrase; could draw out of overworked tools a musical gesture, something astoundingly new and fresh that lodges itself irrevocably in one's memory. That he devoted so much attention to music for voices in ensemble is a blessing for which groups like ours are deeply grateful.

A.M.D.G. (Ad majorem Dei gloriam, "To the greater glory of God"), dates from 1939 and Britten's first trip to the United States, a richly creative period. For reasons that are not clear, Britten abandoned the work and never brought it forward for publication or performance. Difficulty may have had something to do with it, for the songs make prodigious demands on the performers in terms of range, tonal contrast, verbal dexterity and interpretive insight. A.M.D.G. comprises a virtual catalogue of devices that are recognizable because of their use in later works. The Hopkins poetry takes as its title the motto of the Jesuit order that Hopkins joined at the age of 24. It became a dominating influence on his poetry. And it is the intense spirituality of Hopkins's poems that Britten seems most earnestly to have latched onto. Hopkins's oratorical flights are ingeniously translated by Britten: the cascading, overwhelming repetitions of the opening line of God's Grandeur; the relentless pedalpoint and restless rhythms of Rosa mystica, pitting grounded faith against the Mystery of the Rose; the harried confession of unworthiness in O Deus, ego amo te turned into a headlong tumble of words and music in hurtling recitative; the awesome quiet of Heaven-haven, an almost unspeakably serene moment of spiritual repose as conclusion. These, and so many other moments where Britten gets inside the poems and gives them back to us in almost lurid detail, mark A.M.D.G. as a work of major importance and a significant addition to the choral repertoire of this century. The first performance of A.M.D.G. was given in 1984, although the score was not published until 1989. In 1999, The Boston Cecilia gave the first performance in this city.

- Donald Teeters

© 2004 Donald Teeters. All rights reserved.

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