Benjamin Britten (1913-76)
Phantasy, for oboe and strings (1932)
In a serendipitous coincidence, Benjamin Britten’s birthday was November 22nd, St. Cecilia’s Day, the name day of the patron saint of music. It was a fact in which he apparently delighted. A prodigiously talented musician, he began composing at an early age and, by his late teens, was turning out (in his words) “reams and reams” of music.
The Phantasy for oboe and strings was one of those early pieces. Britten wrote it in the fall of 1932, around the time he turned nineteen, and it received its first performance the following summer, courtesy of oboist Leon Goosens and a trio of string players Britten described as “intelligent players [but not] really first class instrumentalists.” Regardless, the piece established Britten as a major player in new music in England, with a London Times critic taking a swipe at Britten’s then-teacher, John Ireland, by suggesting that the Phantasy made Ireland’s “15-year old pianoforte trio sound old fashioned.”
Britten’s title refers to a genre of Elizabethan and Jacobean instrumental music that was revived by a number of English composers in the first decades of the 20th century thanks to a competition sponsored by one Walter Wilson Cobbett, an amateur musician and writer on chamber music. Indeed, Britten won the Cobbett prize in 1932 for a string quintet, though his subsequent (and more highly regarded) Phantasy received no such accolade.
The Phantasy for oboe, violin, viola, and cello is built around three general ideas: the first, a march figure; the second, a lyrical oboe melody; and the third, a brisk violin motive. Formally, it’s a marvelous example of Britten’s progressive conservatism, taking a basic sonata form structure and inserting a slow movement between the development and recapitulation.
Throughout there are marvelous, surprising touches. The slow section, for one, is striking. Not only does it come as a dramatic surprise, but also it hardly features the oboe. After this ends, the recapitulation echoes, exactly, the exposition, but in reverse: first we hear the exposition’s fast music, then its slow opening march. At the end, the solo cello repeats its opening gesture, but this, too, is played backwards, now note for note. There’s also a striking moment in which the oboe, playing at the bottom of its range, anchors the strings, playing in their upper registers. And so forth.
Few 20th-century composers embodied the idea of music as a craft – a concept Bach would have been well familiar with – as thoroughly as Britten did, yet, as with most of his music, there’s never a sense in the Phantasy of a composer simply showing off his technique. Here, in microcosm, is a demonstration of the compositional maturity and depth of expression that would later explode in pieces like the Sinfonia da Requiem, the Violin Concerto, and, most of all, the operas and the War Requiem.
© Jonathan Blumhofer
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