1965

After composing the unconventional but highly successful Night Piece (Notturno) for the inaugural Leeds International Piano Competition, Marion Harewood, the competition's co-founder along with Dame Fanny Waterman, asked Britten to write a further piece for the 1966 contest. He began a set of variations in the autumn of 1965, but the manuscript breaks off just before the end of the sixth of what appear to have been intended to be at least ten variations. Here, in Variations (1965) for Piano , Colin Matthews concludes the sixth variation and you can purchase the piano score, which includes a facsimile reproduction of the first page of Britten's original manuscript.

The composer made this arrangement of the Third String Quartet for string orchestra in March 2003. The first performance was given by the Eos Orchestra New York conducted by Ken Selden in the Concert Hall Ethical CulturalSociety New York City on 24 April 2003.Quoting composer: In the summer of 1989 I composed a choral work Out of the Ruins for Agnieszka Piotrowska’s BBC2 documentary which dealt with the physical and emotional responsesof some of the inhabitants of Leninakhan to the earthquake which devastated Armenia the previous December. When he heard the recording of the work that I made with the Holy Echmiadzin Chorus under the fervent conducting of KhorenMeykhanejian Alex Balanescu suggested turning Out of the Ruins into a string quartet. There seemed no reason or opportunity to do this until I felt the need to add to the intensity of my experiences in Armenia the no lessprofound experience of witnessing the images of the Romanian revolution on television during the latter part of December 1989.Just as the structure of my Third String Quartet (1990) may connect it with the First so they alsoshare a debt to Thurston Dart (my professor at King’s College London between 1961 and 1965). It was Dart who had the inspiration to send me to Romania in 1965 ostensibly to study folk music. The volumes of transcriptions that Ibrought back with me had remained unopened until with this proposed ‘celebratory’ string quartet (though at the time it was difficult to know quite what to celebrate in postrevolutionary Romania) an occasion arose where I coulduse this material in what seemed to me was a non-exploitative manner. The compositional procedure was as follows: to take Out of the Ruins as a template on which the Romanian vocal or instrumental music would besuperimposed quite often stretched into new intervallic shapes through the demands of the completely pre-formed harmonic structure.

After composing the unconventional but highly successful Night Piece (Notturno) for the inaugural Leeds International Piano Competition Marion Harewood the competition's co-founder along with Dame Fanny Waterman asked Britten to write a further piece for the 1966 contest. He began a set of variations in the autumn of 1965 but the manuscript breaks off just before the end of the sixth of what appear to have been intended to be at least ten variations.Here in Variations (1965) for Piano Colin Matthews concludes the sixth variation and you can purchase the piano score which includes a facsimile reproduction of the first page of Britten'soriginal manuscript.