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

Information

Composer: Benjamin Britten

• Piano Concerto in D major, Op. 13
• Young Apollo, for piano, string quartet and string Orchestra, Op. 16
• Diversions, for piano (left hand) and orchestra, Op. 21

Steven Osborne, piano

BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra

Ilan Volkov, conductor

Date: 2008

Label: Hyperion

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Review

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

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Benjamin Britten (22 November 1913 – 4 December 1976) was a leading British composer, pianist and conductor. Trained at the Royal College of Music, he gained early acclaim with Variations on a Theme of Frank Bridge and achieved international prominence with the opera Peter Grimes (1945). His major stage works include Billy Budd, The Turn of the Screw, and Death in Venice, alongside innovative church parables such as Curlew River. Co-founder of the Aldeburgh Festival, he also composed celebrated song cycles, choral works including the War Requiem, and notable orchestral and chamber music.

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Steven Osborne (born 12 March 1971) is a Scottish pianist. He studied with Richard Beauchamp at St Mary's Music School, and with Renna Kellaway at the Royal Northern College of Music. Osborne won first prize in the Clara Haskil International Piano Competition in Switzerland in 1991, and was a BBC New Generation Artist. He has an extensive repertoire, spanning classical, contemporary, and 20th-century works. In his twenty-five years as a Hyperion recording artist, Osborne's thirty-four releases have accumulated numerous awards in the UK, France, Germany and the USA, including two Gramophone Awards.

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