Menuhin Recommends… Simple Symphony by Benjamin Britten

Opening this year’s Summer Festival, this is a piece that encapsulates one of Britain’s best-loved composers. 

The Simple Symphony has become a staple of music for orchestra that reflects Britten’s early music. Written around the age of 20–21, it draws extensively not just from material that he composed from the ages of 9–13 but also the music he would have heard as a child. References to hymns and light music are dotted throughout the piece, which borrows from the structure of orchestral dance suites by Purcell, which would have been performed in aristocratic courts as background music at balls. It received its first performance in 1934 at Stuart Hall in Norwich, with Britten conducting an amateur orchestra. 

Now regarded as one of Benjamin Britten’s earliest masterpieces, the title’s simplicity hides a cinematic, rambunctious and ambitious piece that pushes orchestras to their limits, collating his favourite previous material into a singular work. 

Movement one, the Boisterous Bourrée, sets the tone perfectly, borrowing themes from Suite No. 1 in E for piano and his 1923 Tennyson setting A Country Dance (“Now the King is home again”), text from The Foresters, for voice and piano. As its title suggests, it’s a piece with gusto, vigour and bite, the sections jostling against each other in the texture. 

Where the piece really comes alive is in its second movement, the Playful Pizzicato. Britten breaks from English romanticism to a Stravinsky-esque theme that ricochets around the orchestra in a lightning-fast doubles tennis match, before parodying the opening of Barwick Green, light music which would become the theme music to the long-running BBC Radio 4 programme The Archers. It shows Britten’s love of both the sublime and the ridiculous, which would develop into his comic operas like Albert Herring and cabaret songs. 

More interest develops in the third movement, Sentimental Sarabande, which samples a traditional Swedish melody heard also in the popular Christian hymn “How Great Thou Art”, hinting at the composer's lifelong love of sacred and classical music, dancing with the workmanlike ceremony of Purcell. Journalist Daniel Felsenfeld described that dichotomy wonderfully in The Curious Case of Benjamin Britten: “In Britten’s music the grace and fripperies of Mozart lie with Berg’s Weltschmerz through Purcell’s baroque lens by way of the English countryside.” Already, Britten is breaking away from the stoicism of Elgar and idealism of Vaughan Williams to something far more boldly dramatic. The style of his mentor Frank Bridge shines through in this movement as well, the violins languid and nostalgic over the cello and bass’s stormy interruptions, not unlike Bridge’s sadly neglected string quartets. 

The Frolicsome Finale draws the symphony to a close with a fittingly jovial movement that skips and dances through to a rousing conclusion, the orchestral clustering and then scattering like particles of melody, appropriating the finale of his Piano Sonata No. 9 in C –Sharp Minor (1926). 

For any other composer, the piece would have arguably been a minor work, a piece written for amateurs and performed well before his ascent into the circles of royalty and renown, but such is the remarkable depth of Britten’s writing that it has quietly crept into the public consciousness. For instance, most well-known is its inclusion in Wes Anderson’s 2012 picture Moonrise Kingdom, punctuating that film's darkly comic, whimsical and occasionally absurdist story of loss of innocence to glorious effect, as rooted as it is in Britten’s own childhood. Anderson, a confessed Britten fan, described it simply as “the colour of the movie”. 

Perhaps that is the piece’s real purpose though: to return to the foundations from which a young composer was built, and to finally assemble them into the man he would become. As Britten once said: “Composing is like driving down a foggy road toward a house. Slowly you see more details of the house: the colour of the slates and bricks, the shape of the windows. The notes are the bricks and the mortar.” 

Hear the full piece in our Orchestral Picnic on the 27 June 5pm, part of our Summer Festival.