A gift for friendship

This magnificent edition of Benjamin Britten’s letters reaches its fourth volume under the auspices of a new publisher, the Boydell Press (despite subsidy, Faber simply couldn’t make it pay), and the first thing to say is that the standards of production, design and copy-editing have not suffered (misspellings of names such as John Lanigan, Roderic Dunnett and Geoffrey Willans were the only errors that I picked up), while the scholarly quality of the annotation continues to be quite superb — meticulous, imaginative, and illuminating.

Here we are taken through five important years, marked by the birth of the masterpieces Gloriana, Winter Words, The Turn of the Screw and Noye’s Fludde as well as the most significant flop of Britten’s maturity, the ballet The Prince of the Pagodas — a score over-weighted by the influence of the Balinese gamelan, which he had encountered on a long holiday in Asia in 1956.