Richard Alston Dance Company/Britten Sinfonia, Barbican

As part of its two-week long celebration of Benjamin Britten’s centenary, the Barbican has commissioned a performance which gives equal status to music and dance.  The choreographer Richard Alston has been commissioned to produce dance works to accompany Britten’s vocal music. Dancers from his contemporary dance company, based at The Place, in London, will be joined on stage by the mezzo soprano Allison Cook and tenor Robin Tritschler, along with musicians from the Britten Sinfonia. The performance will not be repeated anywhere else. 

Alston, one of our most musical dance-makers, has always loved Britten’s music and has often chosen to choreograph to it. Two of the works in the Barbican season, Illuminations and Lachrymae , were originally created for the 1994 Aldeburgh Festival in Britten’s own concert hall, in Sussex. The latter, which opens the programme, is a series of elegiac duets to Britten’s score for viola and string orchestra. Illuminations, set to Arthur Rimbaud’s hallucinatory imagery, evokes the obsessive love affair between the wild young poet and the older fellow poet, Paul Verlaine. The singer (originally the English tenor Sir Peter Pears) is the up-and-coming Tritschler, who will also sing the lesser-known song cycle of poems by Friedrich Hölderlin for voice and piano.

Holderlin Fragments is the first of the two Barbican world premieres. The words, written at the start of the 19th century, reflect Britten’s own concerns with the innocence of youth, the power of beauty and intimations of mortality. Six dancers respond to the changing moods of exhilaration, serenity and melancholy. Phaedra, the other premiere, will feature Cook in the title role, which Britten wrote near the end of his life as a solo cantata for Dame Janet Baker in 1975. Alston’s choreography requires the singer to move among the dancers as she expresses Phaedra’s lust for her horrified young stepson, Hippolytus. (The lyrics are based on the French dramatist Jean Racine’s tragedy Phèdre.)This programme offers the only chance to see and hear Phaedra as a dance work because, unlike the other three pieces, it will not be taken on tour.

Tickets: £16 - £35

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