Cheap Albert Herring (Music) (Britten, Bedford, Northern Sinfonia) Price

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Customer Reviews of Albert Herring

Delightful
This charming opera is an ironic look at social repression and innocence. Based on a Guy de Maupassant story, Albert Herring is the story of a simple village boy who breaks out of the constraints imposed by his controlling mother and the village elders. The libretto is written with a gently ironic plot and witty dialogue. The music is both lovely and clever. Britten assigns each major character music consonant with his or her character and there is some really impressive ensemble singing. The quality of this performance is excellent. The individual singers are all excellent and the ensemble singing is first rate. A real must for anyone who likes Britten.

Albert the Good!
This is a budget-priced reissue on Naxos of the performance of 'Albert Herring' previously available from the now-defunct Collins Classics, originally issued in 1997. It features a stellar cast including Josephine Barstow who has owned the role of Lady Billows for perhaps twenty years, Felicity Palmer as the redoubtable Florence Pike, silvery-voiced Susan Gritton as Miss Wordsworth, Robert Lloyd as a lovably inarticulate Superintendent Budd, and Della Jones as Albert's mother, Mrs Herring. The young lovers, Sid and Nancy, are expertly sung and acted by Gerald Finley and Ann Taylor. Perhaps most important of all, Christopher Gillett is a youthful-sounding and increasingly rebellious Albert.

I have known and loved this opera ever since the original recording with Britten conducting and Peter Pears as a somewhat superannuated Albert. Obviously that set, which is still available, has its virtues. I have also seen three productions, including one at Covent Garden that was superb at least partly because the cast had been drilled in East Suffolk accents that had the British audience in stitches. I have not heard the recent recording on Chandos conducted by Richard Hickox.

This recording is a real treasure. Even though the Naxos reissue does not include a libretto - as is customary with most of their opera releases - the diction of most of the singers is exemplary and one has little difficulty understanding the witty dialog written by one of Britten's favorite and most skillful librettists, Eric Crozier. The pacing by Britten specialist Steuart Bedford is geared to the comedy inherent in the libretto; it tends to move right along except for the obvious moments of repose, as in the threnody for the presumed-dead Albert in the last act, or for Albert's big monolog, 'Albert the Good,' in the second act.

There are some who lambaste 'Albert Herring,' Britten's only full-length comedy, as too provincial, too trivial in subject to rank as one of his best operas, but I strongly disagree. And apparently opera-goers disagree, too; 'Herring' is one of Britten's most often produced operas both because it is fairly easy to mount, has a orchestra of only 13 players, and is almost always well-received by the run of opera-goers, many of whom come to the theater thinking it will be 'one of those awful modern things' and come away charmed and delighted.

Heartily recommended.