OUP: Britten: Double concerto for violin and viola

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String Ensemble

Violin

Benjamin Britten

Double concerto for violin and viola

Piano reduction

64 pages | 311x232mm

978-0-19-362252-4 | Paperback | 07 March 2002

Also Available: Full score | Conductor's score and parts on hire

Price: £28.50

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This early Britten work for violin and viola with orchestra has been prepared by Colin Matthews from a sketch which was complete in virtually every detail including instrumentation, but never finished.
Orchestral material is available on hire.

Duration

25 minutes

Difficulty

Difficult

Programme Notes

Britten was so remarkably prolific as a young composer that many of the works from his teens were put aside to await revision or completion as he rushed on to the next piece. This is particularly the case around the time of his Op. I Sinfonietta of 1932 - his second year as a student at the Royal college of Music - which was actually composed in the middle of work on the Double Concerto.
Although the concerto follows the same three-movement pattern as the Sinfonietta, it is more ambitious in scale (lasting nearly twenty-five minutes); and since the sketch is, unusually for Britten, complete in practically every detail, it is puzzling that he was never clear whether he had particular performers in mind, but it is distinctly possible that his experience in rehearsing the Sinfonietta at the Royal College in the autumn (I have never heard such an apalling [sic] row!, he wrote in his diary) discouraged him from completing the Double Concerto.
The music of the concerto is characteristic of Britten at that time, although not so adventurous as the Sinfonietta - a consequence perhaps of the contrast between his composition teacher at the College John Ireland, to whom he showed the work, and his mentor Frank Bridge. The first movement is lively and virtuosic, dominated by the horn call that opens the work. The second movement (there are no breaks between movements) is rhapsodic, with long solo passages for the two protagonists. If these two movements tend towards the conventional, the brilliant tarantella-like finale and sudden return at the end to the music of the first movement are as original as anything he had written to date.
In the absence of Brittens full score, I have had to prepare the work from the sketch. But the instrumentation is so carefully indicated in the draft that what will be heard is virtually 100 per cent Britten. The Double Concerto is the most recent addition to a corpus of works, dating mostly from Brittens youth and early maturity, that, since his death, have been revived after many years, or performed for the first time. Britten himself frequently returned to his early works, and in his last years revised both the early String Quartet in D of 1931 and the opera Paul Bunyan.
© Colin Matthews

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