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Benjamin Britten's Curlew River at Lincoln Center White Light Festival

Oct. 31, 2014

Benjamin Britten's <em>Curlew River</em> at Lincoln Center White Light Festival

From October 30 through November 1, Lincoln Center’s White Light Festival presented the US premiere of Netia Jones’s acclaimed production of Benjamin Britten’s Curlew River, featuring tenor Ian Bostridge as the Madwoman. Martin Fitzpatrick led the Britten Sinfonia, with Eamonn Dougan leading the Britten Sinfonia Voices. The performances took place at the Synod House of the Cathedral of St. John the Divine in New York.

Curlew River, the first of Britten's three Church Parables, was premiered by Peter Pears and the English Opera Group in 1964 at Orford Church in Suffolk, with subsequent performances at the Aldeburgh Festival. Jones’s production, co-produced by the Barbican Center, Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts, Carolina Performing Arts and Cal Performances Berkeley, also features Jeremy White as the Abbot, Neal Davis as The Traveller and Mark Stone as The Ferryman.

Of last year’s performances presented by the Barbican in London, The Guardian’s Rupert Christiansen wrote that he was “stunned into silence by [Jones’s] faultless production” —

The Britten Sinfonia…has got it triumphantly right, with a magnificent cast of musicians and a production by Netia Jones of eloquent simplicity that never allows the densely ritualized action to slip into bathos or unintentional comedy… Britten is attempting something of extraordinary originality here – a synthesis of the different musical and theatrical worlds of Japanese Noh drama and medieval church opera. The result is…a fiercly tense and emotionally resonant parable of grief and loss, in which the wandering Madwoman is finally granted spiritual peace.

For details on the production, visit whitelightfestival.org.

More on Benjamin Britten can be found at fabermusic.com.

Benjamin Britten
Curlew River, Op. 71 (1964)
A parable for church performance
text (En) by William Plomer after the Japanese Noh-play Sumidagawa by Juro Motomasa
for tenor, 2 baritones, bass, boy soprano, chorus (3T, 3Bar, 2B) and 2 assistants (boys; silent roles)
fl(pic)-hn-perc-hp.chamber organ-va.db
70’

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