{"id":760,"date":"2020-02-22T19:26:02","date_gmt":"2020-02-22T19:26:02","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/blog.oganovic.com\/?p=760"},"modified":"2020-03-13T15:11:46","modified_gmt":"2020-03-13T15:11:46","slug":"britten-young-persons-guide-to-the-orchestra-1945","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blog.oganovic.com\/?p=760","title":{"rendered":"Britten ~ Young Person’s Guide to the Orchestra<\/em> (1945)"},"content":{"rendered":"

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Britten ~ Young Person’s Guide to the Orchestra<\/em> (1945)<\/h1>\n

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Benjamin Britten<\/em><\/p>\n

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Although nowadays it is performed as a stand-alone concert piece, this work derives its name from the fact that it was originally commissioned for an educational documentary film called\u00a0Instruments of the Orchestra.<\/i><\/strong> It has in fact\u00a0sometimes been referred to as a “theme and variations\u00a0on Purcell”.<\/p>\n

English composer Benjamin Britten took Purcell’s\u00a0Baroque-era\u00a0melody and harmony, morphed it through his own 20th century aesthetic, and from there created a massive set of themes and variations that concludes with the magnificent counterpoint and chorale excerpted here.<\/p>\n

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In this clip, Sir Simon Rattle conducts the Berlin Philharmonic in the final two minutes of the piece.\u00a0Note how every instrumental group states the theme in advance of the massive hymn-like conclusion. And the camera work in this video is splendid, with each instrument (or instrumental group) in the frame at exactly the right moment.<\/strong><\/p>\n

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Composer Benjamin Britten took melody and harmony from a Baroque era counterpart, Henry Purcell, and perfectly melded it with his own 20th century aesthetic.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":1103,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"nf_dc_page":"","_et_pb_use_builder":"on","_et_pb_old_content":"","_et_gb_content_width":"","_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-760","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-classical-music"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/blog.oganovic.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2020\/02\/Young-Persons-Guide-to-the-Orchestra-album-cover-1.jpg?fit=464%2C381&ssl=1","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.oganovic.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/760","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.oganovic.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.oganovic.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.oganovic.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.oganovic.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=760"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/blog.oganovic.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/760\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1102,"href":"https:\/\/blog.oganovic.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/760\/revisions\/1102"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.oganovic.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/1103"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.oganovic.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=760"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.oganovic.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=760"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.oganovic.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=760"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}