FULL NOCTURNE (Britten) Lucerne 2011 Simon Rattle, Ian Bostridge

Information on the Performance

• Work Title: Nocturne op.60  
• Composer: Britten Benjamin  
• Libretto: various  
• Venue & Opera Company: KKL, Luzern, Switzerland  
• Recorded: September 1, 2011
• Type: Concert Live
• Singers: Ian Bostridge
• Conductor: Simon Rattle  
• Orchestra:
• Stage Director:   
• Costume Designer:   

Information about the Recording

• Published by: accentusmusic, Digital Concert Hall  
• Date Published: 2026  
• Format: Streaming
• Quality Video: 4 Audio:4
• Subtitles: nosubs  

• ADDITIONAL INFORMATION ON THIS PERFORMANCE

  Nocturne, Op. 60, is a song cycle by Benjamin Britten, written for tenor, seven obbligato instruments and strings The seven instruments are flute, cor anglais, clarinet, bassoon, harp, French horn and timpani.

  Nocturne was Britten’s fourth and final orchestral song cycle, after Our Hunting Fathers (Op. 8, 1936), Les Illuminations (Op. 18, 1939) and Serenade for Tenor, Horn and Strings (Op. 31, 1943). It was dedicated to Alma Mahler.

  Nocturne was premiered in the Leeds Town Hall at the centenary Leeds Festival on 16 October 1958 by Peter Pears and the BBC Symphony Orchestra conducted by Rudolf Schwarz.[3] Britten conducted a recording at Walthamstow Assembly Hall in 1960 with Pears, the London Symphony Orchestra and William Waterhouse (bassoon), Alexander Murray (flute), Gervase de Peyer (clarinet), Roger Lord (cor anglais), Osian Ellis (harp), Barry Tuckwell (horn), and Denis Blyth (timpani).

  The theme of the piece, as its name Nocturne suggests, is sleep and darkness, both in the literal and figurative sense. In this respect, the work is reminiscent of Britten’s earlier Serenade. Unlike Serenade, Nocturne is presented as a continuous piece rather than separate movements. This is emphasised by a number of figures which occur throughout, most notably the ‘rocking'[5] string motif which opens the work. The conflicting tonal relationship between C and D-flat is also evident throughout, reflecting the contrast between the untroubled and the more perturbed aspects of sleep which are also described by Britten’s choice of poems.

  Structure
  The piece sets eight sections of poetry to music, each accompanied by strings and (with the exception of the first) by an obbligato instrument:

  Shelley – “On a Poet’s Lips I Slept” from Prometheus Unbound
  Tennyson – “The Kraken”, with bassoon
  Coleridge – “Encinctured with a twine of leaves” from The Wanderings of Cain Archived 18 February 2009 at the Wayback Machine, with harp
  Middleton – “Midnight Bell” from Blurt, Master Constable, with French horn
  Wordsworth – “But that night when on my bed I lay” from The Prelude (1805), with timpani
  Owen – “The Kind Ghosts”, with cor anglais
  Keats – “Sleep and Poetry”, with flute and clarinet
  Shakespeare – Sonnet XLIII, with all the obbligato instruments

  Quoted from Wikipedia

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