Britten The Young Person’s Guide
Britten The Young Person’s Guide to the Orchestra Variations and Fugue on a Theme of Purcell Program Notes
Not too long after returning from Lenox, Massachusetts, where he’d workshopped his new opera Peter Grimes with the students at Tanglewood (and their young conductor, Leonard Bernstein), English composer Benjamin Britten was brought into another education project. A new film, The Instruments of the Orchestra, was to be produced for projecting at school assemblies, and featured the Liverpool Philharmonic Orchestra with conductor Malcolm Sargent conducting and speaking the narration to camera. (In live performance, narration is best left to experts, and it is with great joy we welcome Charlotte Blake Alston to narrate this performance!) Britten’s friend and collaborator Eric Crozier wrote the narration. (Crozier also wrote the libretto to Albert Herring, produced the first British production of Peter Grimes, and was a co-founder of the Aldeburgh Festival). As a musical subject for the introduction and thirteen variations, Britten chose a theme by an earlier English composer, Henry Purcell (1659-95). Today, Purcell’s most famous work is his opera Dido & Aeneas (first performed 1689), but this melody comes from incidental music to the tragic English play Abdelazer. After the orchestra’s families and instruments have been introduced in turn, with characteristic and inventive variations, the piece’s largest section, a lively fugue, begins. Each of the instruments enter in the same order as before, and once they’re all playing together, Purcell’s grand theme returns to end the piece. Born: November 22, 1913, Lowestoft, United Kingdom Died: December 4, 1976, Aldeburgh, United KingdomThe Young Person's Guide to the Orchestra, Op. 34 is an educational orchestral work by Benjamin Britten, composed in 1945 to introduce listeners to the instruments of the orchestra. It is built on a theme by the seventeenth-century English composer Henry Purcell and takes the form of a theme, variations showcasing each orchestral section, and a brilliant fugue.
Britten composed the work in 1945 for a British documentary film called Instruments of the Orchestra, narrated by the conductor Malcolm Sargent. The concert version was premiered in Liverpool on October 15, 1946.
A typical performance lasts approximately 17 to 20 minutes.
The work systematically showcases every section and instrument of the orchestra through a series of variations, each tailored to display the particular character and technical capabilities of its featured instrument. The concluding fugue brings all the themes together simultaneously in a dazzling display of orchestral counterpoint.
Britten's choice to base the work on a theme by Purcell was a deliberate act of homage to the great English Baroque composer whom he deeply admired. The work has been performed with narration in dozens of languages worldwide and has introduced millions of children and adults to the instruments of the orchestra — fulfilling its educational purpose more successfully than almost any other piece ever written.
