- Date: 1937
- Composer: Benjamin Britten
- Period: Modern (1910-1949)
Review
In 1937 Britten resigned from his job providing music for General Post Office film documentaries and transferred that phase of his career to the BBC, for which he wrote several notable incidental music scores. The BBC, with a large group of musicians and singers on hand, provided Britten with a larger scope of this creation. Among the group known as the "BBC Singers" was the young tenor Peter Pears, with whom Britten became friends at about this time.The Company of Heaven was written for a special broadcast on Michaelmas, 1937, the Feast Day of St. Michael and all Angels. The text was devised by Richard Robert Ellis, and consists of sections of scripture, of poetry, and of speeches in the manner of homilies, some of which are spoken and others of which are set to music by Britten. The music itself is large-scale and expansive, highly attractive, with special care seemingly taken to project the text clearly, for an audience who will be gathered around radio loudspeakers without benefit of a written text. One of the numbers, a radiant tenor solo to Brontë's poem "A Thousand, Thousand Gleaming Fires", is no doubt the first music Britten wrote specially for Pears. ~ All Music Guide
