Program Notes (February 7, 2009 @ 2pm)
Benjamin Britten Noye’s Fludde
Members of Cantata Singers in a staged performance featuring young singers and instrumentalists from Boston area arts organizations.
Britten was the twentieth century’s greatest opera composer. His opera Noye’s Fludde, really a musical pageant, grabs young and not with its childlike impatience and optimism, and with its adult understanding. It’s filled with magical invention. Imogen Holst (the daughter of Gustav) wrote that Britten “had the idea of hitting teacups with teaspoons to represent the sound of the first raindrops falling on the ark, but he came round to me one afternoon saying that he’d tried it out at tea-time and it wouldn’t work. By great fortune I had once had to teach Women’s Institute percussion groups during a wartime ‘social half hour,’ so I was able to take him into my kitchen and show him how a row of china mugs hanging on a length of string could be hit with a large wooden spoon.”