Friday, April 9, 2010

2-for-1 Tickets to "When Britten Met Haydn" with The Boston Cecilia

The Boston Cecilia presents When Britten Met Haydn. Friday, April 16, 8:00 PM at All Saints Parish, Brookline, MA

Ticket Sale! Today, Friday 4/9, through Monday 4/12, buy one ticket and get one free when you purchase tickets online! Offer applies to ticket levels A, B, and C. Use coupon code BrittenHaydn2for1 at the end of the online checkout.

Featuring tenor Aaron Sheehan and BSO principal horn James Sommerville, Cecilia celebrates the similar depth and compassion of Britten and Haydn.

Joseph Haydn Benjamin   Britten

Joseph HAYDN
Missa Brevis St. Joannis de Deo (Kleine Orgelmesse)
Salve Regina in g minor

Benjamin BRITTEN
Cantata Misericordium
Serenade for Tenor, Horn and Strings

Friday, April 16, 2010 at 8:00 PM
All Saints Church
1773 Beacon Street
Brookline, MA 02445

Reserve tickets to this performance now!

The Boston Cecilia presents "When Britten Met Haydn" on Friday, April 16 at 8pm at All Saints Church in Brookline. Featuring tenor Aaron Sheehan and BSO principal horn James Sommerville alongside a quartet of young soloists, Cecilia celebrates the similar depth and compassion that Britten and Haydn brought to the world through music. Coming from different cultural, religious, and social backgrounds, and separated by two centuries, both found in music profundities at which their surfaces sometimes only hint.

An excerpt from When Britten Met Haydn program notes
by Donald Teeters

Is it more than a catchy title? Separated by centuries, the two composers were certainly social and cultural strangers. Public recognition? For Britten, it came early but was complicated by lifestyle and war. Haydn’s came late—he was an old man when world fame finally caught up with him. However, it took a couple of centuries for appreciation to reach into some very large corners of his art.

Why was that? It is aspects of the obvious vs. the oblique, the surface vs. the inner meanings that prompted us to give this concert its title. Hans Keller, the Viennese-born but consummately English critic and musical scholar, spoke of this connection in relation to Britten’s works.

“While one does not usually find things that are not there, one often does not find things that are. I would suggest that both Mozart and Britten [and I would include Haydn here] sublimate not only their depths but also their heights, i.e. they even sublimate their sublimity.”

While Haydn’s surfaces can sometimes and at first glance seem generic, too simple, too much like other composers’ music of the same period, further digging almost always leads one to a rich interior lode waiting to be mined. And here is The New Yorker critic, Alex Ross, comparing Britten with two contemporaries, Sibelius and Shostakovich:

“What they had in common was the ability to write elusive emotions across the surface of their music. Britten made his inner landscape as vivid as the rumble of the sea, the cries of the gulls . . .”

Perhaps we can find a common meeting ground between tonight’s two disparate but genuine geniuses: surfaces sometimes belie, but listening deeply and with an eager ear to the works of Haydn and Britten never fails to reward.

CLICK HERE TO PURCHASE TICKETS!
Individual, regularly-priced tickets are $15, $27, $42, $62

1773 Beacon Street Brookline MA 02445 | www.bostoncecilia.org | 617.232.4540