Travel Diaries, 1936-1978. This item is unavailable.Travel Diaries, 1936-1978

This volume brings together for the first time all the travel diaries of distinguished tenor Sir Peter Pears (1910-1986), friend of Benjamin Britten and principal interpreter of his works. The first diary dates from 1936, the year before Pears' friendship with Britten began, when he went on tour of North america with the New English Singers. Other diaries record the five month tour of the Far East and important encounters (especially for Britten) with the gamelan music of Bali and the Japanese Noh theatre; visits to Russia as guests of Mstislav Rostropovicha and his wife Galina Vishnevskaya, where they met significant figures from Russian musical life; attendance at the Ansbach Bach festival when Pears was at the height of his career, unrivalled as an interpreter of the Evangelist in Bach's `Passions'; holidays in the Caribbean and Italy, a concert tour of the north of England, and accounts of the rehearsals and performances of the New York premieres of `Billy Budd' and `Death in Venice'. The diaries, rendered in Pears's highly individual prose, reveal much of his cultivated personality and add significantly to our knowledge of Britten. They have been scrupulously annotated by Philip Reed, Staff Musicologist at the Britten-Pears Library, Aldeurgh. [East Anglian] This volume brings together for the first time all the travel diaries of the distinguished tenor Sir Peter Pears (1910-1986), friend of Benjamin Britten and principal interpreter of his works. The sequence of eleven diaries begins in 1936, the year before he met Britten, when Pears was a member of the New English Singers embarking on his first tour of the United States and Canada. Later diaries tell of trips made in Britten's company; of especial interest is the diary from 1955, describing their tour of India, Japan and Bali where the soundof the gamelan orchestras enchanted Britten and deeply influenced his musical development. Pears' colourful account of their journey provides a unique insight into his subsequent work.

Philip Reed is an independent scholar whose many publications include co-editing six volumes of Letters from a Life: The Selected Letters of Benjamin Britten, 1913-1976; Benjamin Britten: Billy Budd (edited with Mervyn Cooke); The Travel Diaries of Peter Pears, 1936-78 and On Mahler and Britten, as well as contributions to studies of Britten's operas and War Requiem, and books on Poulenc and Elizabeth Maconchy.