Before the 1945 debut of Benjamin Britten’s Peter Grimes crashed the operatic world and finally gave English-language opera a foothold in the international repertory, the young composer had already completed several compositions that revealed his mastery of setting English texts to music.
One of those illuminating early works is his 1943 Serenade for Tenor, Horn and Strings, which La Jolla SummerFest presented Friday featuring American tenor Zachary Wilder and German horn virtuoso Stefan Dohr. Britten took six poems that capture the temporal and spiritual aspects of night written by some of England’s greatest poets—Tennyson, Blake, Keats, Jonson—and gave the tenor soloist spirited, evocative lines to unlock their mystery and indulge their beauty. To this he added soaring and magical descants for the horn as well as a lush accompaniment for string orchestra.
Under the baton of the SummerFest Chamber Orchestra’s conductor Osmo Vänskä, this rich tapestry enchanted Friday’s audience at The Conrad. Wilder’s lithe but colorful tenor skillfully navigated Britten’s graceful melodic traceries while he plumbed the depths of the composer’s selected poetry. He portrayed apt ebullience, for example, in Tennyson’s excited refrain “Blow, bugle, blow, set the wild echoes flying” from his poem Nocturne, and I felt a shiver of dread as Wilder chanted “Fire and fleet and candle-lighte, And Christe receive thy saule” a refrain from the anonymous 15th-century Lyke Wake Dirge.
Dohr’s eloquently shaped horn passages complemented Wilder’s lyrical forays with a delicate shimmer and purity of tone that few horn players are able to sustain—as he did with apparent ease—throughout the instrument’s entire compass. I was not surprised when I checked Dohr’s bio and learned that he is Principal Horn for the Berlin Philharmonic. Under Vänskä’s attentive baton, the strings provided a lush sonic cushion that aptly supported Wilder and Dohr’s sensuous, probing account of this inspiring Britten masterpiece.
The pairing of Wilder and Dohr in Franz Schubert’s late song “Auf dem Strom,” D. 943, proved less satisfying, although I cannot blame the performers. Schubert was writing for the smaller, more delicate sounding Waldhorn that could easily balance the solo voice, whereas today’s horn was developed at the end of the 19th century to handle the orchestral demands of composers such as Richard Wagner and Richard Strauss. Dohr did his best to match his volume to the tenor, but Schubert’s dense textures—unlike Britten’s more discrete antiphonal scoring of voice and horn—worked against his best efforts. Nevertheless, it was rewarding to hear this rarely programmed late Schubert work and appreciate his impressive counterpoint as well as his predicable melodic gift.
Arvo Pärt’s 1977 Cantus in Memory of Benjamin Britten served as the prelude to Britten’s Serenade. A short but powerfully intense essay for string orchestra and a single tolling bell—actually a tubular chime in the work’s key of A natural minor—the lines of Cantus slowly move in a kind of radiant suspended animation. At the time of Britten’s death in 1976, Pärt was living in his native Estonia, then a part of the musically isolated Soviet Union.
The composer’s own words explain his impetus to write Cantus:
“I had just discovered Britten for myself. Just before his death I began to appreciate the unusual purity of his music . . . And besides, for a long time I had wanted to meet Britten personally – and now it would not come to that.”
The SummerFest Chamber Orchestra gave a compelling account of this Britten homage, with the violas projecting its canonic theme with unusually sumptuous timbre.
On a less spectacular chamber program, Robert Schumann’s Piano Trio in G Minor, Op. 110, might have been the center of attention. Far less popular today than the Schubert Piano Trios, Schumann’s late Piano Trio abounds in turbulent but magnificently crafted counterpoint in the fast movements and a sublimely lyrical slow movement. Violinist Alexi Kenney, cellist Nicolas Altstaedt and pianist Inon Barnatan gave a bracing, beautifully shaped account of the Piano Trio. But after hearing the Pärt and the Britten works on the program, I had to consult my own diligent program note-taking to recall the Schumann.
This concert was presented by the La Jolla Music Society’s SummerFest 2025 at The Conrad in downtown La Jolla on August 15, 2025.