Benjamin Britten: Our Hunting Fathers op. 8: High Voice

Britten was so remarkably prolific as a young composer that many of the works from his teens were put aside to await revision or completion as he rushed on to the next piece. This was particularly the case around the time of hisOpus 1 Sinfonietta composed in the summer of 1932 his second year as a student at the Royal College Of Music.The Sinfonietta was written (in less than three weeks) very soon after Britten had completed thefirst draft of the Double Concerto; but after finishing the Sinfonietta he went back to revise the Concerto's second movement. He started work on his Op.2 Phantasy for Oboe and String Trio a few weekslater.Although the Concerto follows the same three-movement pattern as the Sinfonietta it is more ambitious in scale; and since the sketch is unusually for Britten complete in practically every detail it ispuzzling that he never made a full score of the work after finishing the composition and seems to have made no attempt to get it performed. It is not clear if he had particular performers in mind (he was of course a Violaplayer although he is not likely to have intended the part for himself). He showed the work to his composition teacher at the college John Ireland who as Britten recorded in his diary was 'pretty pleased' with it; but it isdistinctly possible that his experience in rehearsing the Sinfonietta with a student orchestra in 1932 ('I have never heard such an appalling row!' reads another diary entry) discouraged him from going on to complete theDouble Concerto in score. He was not to hear any of his orchestral works until the first performance of Our Hunting Fathers in 1936.In the absence of Britten's full score it was necessary for me to prepare the workfrom the sketch. But the instrumentation is so carefully indicated in the draft that the resulting score is not far from being 100% Britten - only between bars 70 and 74 of the slow movement did there seem to be any need to add