Benjamin Britten (1913-1976)
Noye’s Fludde, Op.58
Variations on a theme of Frank Bridge, Op.10
Owen Brannigan (bass), Gladys Parr (contralto), Trevor Anthony (speaker)
English Opera Group/Charles Mackerras  
Boyd Neel String Orchestra/Boyd Neel
First recordings: West Hampstead Studios, London, 14-15 July 1938 (Variations); Aldeburgh Festival, 18 June 1958 (Fludde)
Pristine Audio PACO202 [72]

This world premiere performance of Noye’s Fludde was recorded by the BBC at the Aldeburgh Festival in 1958, probably in Orford Church. It is presented without applause and framed between short radio announcements. These are pretty perfunctory and add little other than period feel, but they are separately banded and so can be easily ignored.

Noye’s Fludde is a strange beast, a kind of opera but designed for performance in a church. Britten went on to create his three ‘parables for church performance’, but I don’t really hear the work as a precursor of the form Britten invented with Curlew River. Noye receives a warning from God that he intends to destroy mankind by flooding the world and then start again from scratch. Noye and his family are to be saved: he must build an boat that will protect his family, plus two of each animal species, from the flood waters. God is represented by a distant spoken voice, and he, along with Noye and his wife, are the only adult performers on stage. All other roles were designed to be taken by children. Important orchestral parts are designed for children too, in varying degrees of difficulty. Around 150 young musicians apparently played at the premiere recorded here. Three hymns punctuate the work. They would have been familiar to much of the audience – or congregation as the score designates them – are required to stand and sing them. (Britten had done something similar ten years earlier in his cantata Saint Nicolas.)

Though composed for children, Britten treated the work with as much seriousness and reverence as he would any one of his compositions, and the work is stuffed full of musical gems. The syncopated enthusiasm of Noah’s children as they get stuck into the construction of the ark is irresistible, and the animals sing ‘Kyrie eleison’ as they troop into the ark in procession, two by two, to the sound of bugles. The first drops of rain are represented by tapping on coffee mugs slung on wire. The dove who confirms the waters’ retreat by bringing back an olive twig flies around the arc to a ‘graceful waltz’ played on the recorder. These are only a few examples: there are many more. The children and adults who prepared and performed the work must surely have had tremendous fun doing it, but how would it go down today? When you hear the Aldeburgh congregation haul itself to its feet for the first hymn you do tend to wonder how much rapport a contemporary audience would feel with the work. Bugles and hand bells, too, seem distant from contemporary preoccupations. And one further point: can we really be in sympathy with the message conveyed by the story? (I have similar doubts about the third church parable, The Prodigal Son.) But perhaps I am taking the work too seriously: Noye’s Fludde is a setting of the 15th-century Chester Miracle Play whose purpose, no doubt, was as much entertainment as instruction.

Conducting the work must be a nightmare. Charles Mackerras, once a Britten favourite but later frozen out of the composer’s circle, seems to have achieved miracles. The Voice of God is played by Welsh bass, Trevor Anthony. His stentorian manner seems old-fashioned now, and is hardly the ‘simple and sincere delivery, without being at all “stagey”’ that the score’s Introductory Note asks for. It’s a pity, too, that he makes so little of the composer’s indications of ‘quietly’ and ‘very tenderly’ at the end of the work. Owen Brannigan plays Noye: he is excellent, solid, dependable and loveable. Gladys Parr is very fine too, as his wife, her singing full of character, a true assumption of the role in which the singing never draws attention to itself. Noye’s patience is sorely tried when she refuses to get into the boat. Her companions – her ‘gossips’ – are in wonderfully exaggerated voice as they support her, but when her sons carry her bodily into the ark and she rewards her husband with a slap this provokes laughter from the audience. Noye’s children are also extremely well portrayed, with the part of Jaffett played by Michael Crawford, later to find television fame as one Frank Spencer. His broken voice means that he sings much of the part an octave lower. When the rain finally comes the slung mugs – what an idea! – are rather covered by the piano, which is a pity. The orchestral playing, from young and old alike, is perfectly fine, but pity the poor bugler whose final note, a solo, and the final note of the whole work, does not turn out quite as intended. The storm itself, in Britten’s favoured passacaglia form, is a fearsome event. Here, as elsewhere the deep percussion – timpani, bass drum – are rather ill-defined in the recording, and the cymbals are directly under the listener’s nose.

Decca engineers were on hand at the Aldeburgh Festival three years later to record the work again, live in Orford Church and in stereo. Trevor Anthony and Owen Brannigan took the same roles, but Mrs Noye was played by Sheila Rex. The professional orchestra reads like a list of the finest ensemble players in the UK at that time, and the performance was conducted by Normal Del Mar. There is more audible ‘theatre’: the animals’ procession is gloriously chaotic and must have had Del Mar’s hair falling out. The performance overall is understandably more polished, and the sound is far superior to the BBC recording, though a very few details, the hand bells that announce the first rainbow, for instance, make less effect than before. The enthusiasm of the whole company is evident, and there is much magic, an ingredient rather lacking in the only other recording I know, conducted by Richard Hickox and recorded on the Virgin Classics label in 1989.

Once the final note had been inserted into the score of the Variations on a Theme of Frank Bridge, the 23-year-old Benjamin Britten meticulously added the date. This is what he wrote in his diary for that same day, 12 July 1937: ‘I spend the whole of the day writing the score (from a very rough sketch from Saturday) of the fugal end of the Variations. I feel rather proud of my 11 part fugue with Canto written straight into the score in ink!’ Britten’s diaries and letters show that not only did he work remarkably quickly, but that his capacity for work was enormous. As well as hours spent composing and copying, his diary lists concerts he attended and listened to on the radio as well as a cast of characters and family members visited and with whom he spent his time. One wonders how he managed to squeeze it all into 24 hours. The Variations was written, all 25 minutes of it, within the space of five or six weeks, to an urgent commission from Boyd Neel, who gave the first performance at the 1937 Salzburg Festival. This recording was made a year later.

Frank Bridge was Britten’s teacher and mentor. The theme Britten chose is discreet and tenuous: listeners can pass many a happy hour trying to find signs of it in the variations themselves. The work was a success at its Austrian premiere, though later it came to be seen as an example of a young composer being ‘too clever by half’. It is true that the sheer brilliance and variety of the variations, one after the other, can be perceived, by anyone who so chooses, as a supremely talented young musical mind showing off. But any such judgement in respect of the fugue referred to above is surely misguided. Its rather jagged theme eventually withdraws and becomes a kind of background over which the composer brings back, in recognisable form, the Bridge theme played in extended notes. There is a dreamlike quality to this passage, wherein the chattering fugue material seems always to have been there, just waiting for the ‘Canto’ to appear above it. The composer, directing the English Chamber Orchestra on Decca, recreates this effect in a rather miraculous manner, something that the present performers, with the fugal material too present and forward, do not achieve. It is a fine performance, though, with the work’s varying moods well captured. There are occasional signs of strain, most noticeable from the first violins in their highest register. We know that Britten attended rehearsals for the early performances of the work, but whether he was present for the recording we may never know, as his diary stops abruptly and without warning on 15 June, a month before the recording took place.

Frank Bridge died less than four years after Britten completed what is a profound and deeply touching homage to his teacher. This is a fine account of the work, as is the performance of Noye’s Fludde. The disc carries the title ‘Britten World Premières’, and therein, I think, lies its main raison-d’être. Unconditional Britten admirers will want it and will derive much pleasure from it. I have no access to the original recordings, but Andrew Rose no doubt worked wonders in producing these Ambient Stereo versions. Newcomers to Noye’s Fludde will have difficulty working out what is going on as no texts are provided. Although both works are available in better sound and finer performances, this is, none the less, a fascinating and important document, and one to which this particular unconditional Britten admirer will certainly be returning.

William Hedley

Previous review: Paul Corfield Godfrey (July 2023)

Availability: Pristine Classical

Additional cast
Noye’s Fludde
Thomas Bevan and Marcus Norman, trebles
Michael Crawford, tenor
Janette Miller, Katherine Dyson, Marilyn Baker, Penelope Allen, Doreen Metcalfe, Dawn Mendham and Beverley Newman, girl sopranos