Although his life was marked with many ‘establishment’ honours he remained at heart an outsider. Leonard Bernstein, interviewed for Tony Palmer’s Britten documentary, ‘A Time There Was’ said: “He was a man at odds with the world … [his music] was dark, there are gears grinding and not quite meshing … masking great pain.”

Britten won a triumph in 1945 with his opera Peter Grimes, first staged when the Sadler's Wells in London re-opened after the 1939-1945 war. Britten's subsequent operas, including the Church Parables that draw inspiration from Japan and the remarkable operatic version of Thomas Mann's Death in Venice (Britten's last opera), constitute a very significant element in dramatic and operatic repertoire.

The best known of all Britten's orchestral music must be the Variations and Fugue on a Theme of Purcell, more generally known under its popular title.

The Young Person's Guide to the Orchestra, a work that is both a tribute to the great 17th century English composer Henry Purcell and a useful teaching instrument. Lachrymae, subtitled Reflections on a Theme of Dowland, a tribute to a still earlier predecessor, the lutenist John Dowland, arranged by the composer shortly before his death from its original viola and piano version is immensely moving, while the early Matinées Musicales, based on the music of Rossini, is immediately attractive. Britten's Simple Symphony, for string orchestra, based on tunes written by the composer in childhood, is a useful element in string orchestra repertoire.

Britten was strongly influenced in his music and in his life by the tenor Peter Pears. For him he wrote a quantity of songs, including the splendid Serenade for tenor, horn and strings, and the evocative Nocturne, incomparable settings of the words of various English poets, with a number of other settings of poets from Michelangelo to Thomas Hardy, for tenor and piano. His folk-song arrangements have pleased a wide audience. Major choral works include the War Requiem, a work that combines the text of the Latin Requiem with the war poems of Wilfred Owen, an expression of Britten's own pacifism. Britten's chamber music includes a Cello Sonata and three Cello Suites for his friend the Russian cellist Mstislav Rostropovich, a fine Suite for the Welsh harpist Osian Ellis and a Nocturnal after John Dowland for the guitarist Julian Bream. Of his three numbered string quartets, Quartet No. 2 was written to mark the 250th anniversary of the death of Purcell, the quartet's inspiration.

Britten started to write his Suite for violin and piano in Vienna in November 1934 and allowed three movements to be played in the following month. Six months later two more movements were added (at the end of his life he authorized its republication in three movements, March, Lullaby, and Waltz, leaving out the Introduction and Moto perpetuo.) It is based on a motto-phrase e-f-b-c, which tempts thoughts of a Schoenbergian row, and makes frequent use of scales displaced by transposition of octaves… In Lullaby, diatonic harmony reasserts itself, and Waltz is a spiky parody rounded off by the return of the motto-phrase and the introductory theme.

The Violin Concerto, op. 15, is a masterpiece of virtuosic brilliance with a deep vein of melancholy lyricism. It is extremely beautiful and skilfully wrought, and, whilst subtle, leaves no doubt as to its seriousness of purpose. The sense of freedom which inhabits the music is perpetuated by the sheer force of the emotional and symphonic logic embodied in the sounds of the solo instrument. Whilst Britten’s vocal music receives most attention, his Violin Concerto leaves no doubt as to Britten’s mastery in purely instrumental forms of expression.

(Information extracted from ‘Britten’, by Michael Kennedy)