Faber Music Faber Music has an enviable list of contemporary composers. A marvellous new film version of Britten s opera Owen Wingrave left audience and critics amazed following a pre-broadcast screening at the Aldeburgh Festival in June. It was broadcast nationally in the UK on 28 July, and is the first time a new version has been attempted since the world premiere in 1971 of Britten s opera for TV . Sensitively directed by Margaret Williams of MJW Productions, there is a stunning cast, including Gerald Finley, Peter Savidge, Dame Josephine Barstow, Anne Dawson, Hilton Marlon, Elizabeth Gale, Charlotte Hellekant and Martyn Hill. The synchronisation is faultless.
Brilliant use is made of soliloquies.
When the crammer Coyle muses on Owen s excellence as a soldier, we hear his voice, but his lips are not moving. This technique works marvellously at the dinner at Paramore, where we hear each character s thoughts impossible to achieve in an opera house. Few recent new works for ensemble can have had the immediate impact and success of Kenneth Hesketh s The Circling Canopy of Night , a Faber Music Millennium Series commission. The same forces give the work at the Musikmonat 2001 in Basel, Switzerland on 12 November, and then it receives its Dutch premiere on 26 March 2002, when Knussen directs the ASKO Ensemble in Amsterdam s Paradiso Caf . Meanwhile, Hesketh s works for wind band and brass band are rapidly establishing him as one of the hottest properties in this area.