John Bridcut, author of the acclaimed 'Britten's Children', has included significant fresh material which will make the book indispensable for Britten aficionados as well as for those who are discovering the composer's music for the first time. This guide is all about finding a way into Britten's music. An outline of planned chapters: - The Top Ten Britten pieces - Critics' First Impressions - Britten's Life - Britten and Pears - The things they said - The Music (stage works, choral works, songs, chamber music, orchestral works) - The Interpreters of Britten's work - Britten as Performer - The Impresario (English Opera Group and Aldeburgh Festival) - Britten's Homes - Trivial Pursuits

Britten's Children confronts the edgy subject of the composer's obsessional yet strangely innocent relationships with adolescent boys. One of the hallmarks of Benjamin Britten's music is his use of boys' voices, and John Bridcut uses this to create a fresh prism through which to view the composer's life. Interweaving discussion of the music he wrote for and about children with interviews with the boys whom Britten befriended, Bridcut explores the influence of these unique friendships - notably with the late David Hemmings - and how they helped Britten maintain links with his own happy childhood. In a remarkable part of the book Bridcut tells for the first time the full story of Britten's love affair in the 1930s with the 18-year-old German Wulff Scherchen, son of the conductor Hermann Scherchen. As Paul Hoggart of The Times commented, 'this type of love belonged to an emotional landscape that has vanished for ever, and we are the poorer for it'. Since making the film, the author has extended his research to include friendships Britten had with children which have not previously been documented.The documentary Britten's Children won the Royal Philharmonic Society's 2005 Award for Creative Communication: 'this serious and beautiful film explored one aspect of a composer's life in great depth. Avoiding the temptation of sensationalism, Britten's Children was imaginatively researched and both touching and revelatory'.

An insightful, provocative selection of the best opera performances, chosen by The New York Times's chief classical music critic in one hundred original essays Opera intertwines the drama of the theater with the powerful emotionality of music. In this magical and illuminating guide to the best opera recordings, Anthony Tommasini delves into the ways story and music interweave to create the subtle but telling moments that move us. Tommasini brings to life the rich history of opera performance and the singers and conductors who, over the past century, have come to own the music. He chooses masterworks, such as Arturo Toscanini's La Boheme, captured for posterity fifty years after he conducted the opera's 1896 premiere for Puccini, and Leontyne Price's Leonora in Il Trovatore, an encapsulation of the ideal Verdi soprano. For aficionados and newcomers alike, Tommasini is the perfect guide to the passions and playfulness of the opera.

In this classic study of Benjamin Britten and Michael Tippett, Arnold Whittall builds up a unique double portrait of the two leading composers of their generation. For this second, revised edition Whittall includes a new chapter on Tippett's major works of the 1980s: the Piano Sonata No. 4, the large-scale choral composition The Mask of Time and the most recent opera, New Year. In addition, new information on the Britten repertoire and an updated bibliography are also presented.

A thick and informative guide to the world of classical music and its stunning recordings, complete with images from CD cases, concert halls, and of the musicians themselves.

Ideas in Profile Series Is music a science or an art? It's both, as Andrew Gant reveals in this lively and accessible account of what music is and what it's for. Music has been central to life since the dawn of humankind and is intimately bound up with the origins of language. Andrew Gant introduces us to its long history and its many genres and manifestations. He explains how composers compose, players play and singers sing. He looks at how musical styles develop, the ways they fall in and out of fashion, and why certain kinds of music - dancing and love songs, for example - is a universal in human culture. He considers how music is composed, the nature of genius and the workings of inspiration. He shows how music can be composed and used to stir patriotism, instill courage, reinforce identity, sell a product, or make a political point. And he goes beyond humans to examine music in the natural world in the creativity of birdsong. This is, in short, the ideal introduction to a very big subject.

Traces scholarly thought from the nineteenth-century birth of evolutionary biology to the mapping of the human genome through forty-eight essays, arranged in chronological order, each preceded by a one-page essay that explains the significance of the chosen work.