The oboist Hansjörg Schellenberger was born in 1948 into a family that encouraged his musical proclivities from an early age. At the age of six he began to play the recorder and by the age of ten was showing great enthusiasm for the performance of Baroque music and for composition. He began his study of the oboe at the age of thirteen, winning a German youth competition in 1965 and first prize as the best conductor at the Interlochen Music Camp in America. At the age of seventeen he began his study of the oboe, conducting and mathematics in Munich and in Detmold.

After success in various competitions, including the ARD in Munich in 1972, he started his career in 1971 with the West German Radio Symphony Orchestra in Cologne, serving as principal oboe from 1980. He has won an international reputation as an oboist, and has collaborated with the most distinguished conductors, including Herbert von Karajan, Carlo María Giulini, Claudio Abbado, Riccardo Muti, and James Levine. In chamber music his activities have centred on the Vienna-Berlin Ensemble. He established, with players from the Berlin Philharmonic, the Berlin Haydn Ensemble, of which he is artistic director, since 1991 playing music written by Haydn during his first years with the Esterházys. As a member of the Berlin Philharmonic he played under leading conductors and in 1994 began his career as a conductor, collaborating with the orchestras including the Jerusalem Symphony Orchestras, Orchestra of the Maggio Musicale Fiorentino and the Orchestra of the Comunidad de Madrid, among others.

He has maintained a strong interest in contemporary music and has recorded with DGG, Denon, Sony Classical, Orfeo and other companies. In some of these he has collaborated with his wife, the harpist Margit-Anna Süss, winning the German Schallplatten-Preis in 1999. In 1997, together with his wife, he set up his own recording company, Campanella Musica, to record the repertoire that had seemed most significant to him duing his entire career.

Benjamin Britten must be accepted as the most outstanding English composer working in the mid-20th century. He won a significant international reputation while remaining thoroughly English in inspiration, a feat that his immediate predecessors had been unable fully to achieve.

Operas

Britten won a triumph in 1945 with his opera Peter Grimes, first staged when Sadler’s Wells Theatre in London reopened after the Second World War. The aspirations of the central character, the fisherman Peter Grimes, a man at odds with the community in which he lives, are frustrated by a combination of social pressure and sheer chance, leading to his suicide. The drama is set against the background of the sea, in various moods, summarised in Four Sea Interludes, whichforms an evocative piece of concert repertoire. Britten’s subsequent operas include works on a smaller scale for his English Opera Group: The Rape of Lucretia, Albert Herring and The Turn of the Screw. Billy Budd and the coronation opera Gloriana were followed by A Midsummer Night’s Dream, the television opera Owen Wingrave, and the remarkable operatic version of Thomas Mann’s Death in Venice. His three church parables draw inspiration from Japan and from their medieval setting. All these works constitute a very significant element in international dramatic and operatic repertoire. An early collaboration with the poet WH Auden, Paul Bunyan, was staged in New York in 1941, to be revised in 1974 for publication.

Orchestral Music

The best known of all Britten’s orchestral music must be Variations and Fugue on a Theme of Purcell (more generally known under its popular title The Young Person’s Guide to the Orchestra), a work that is both a tribute to the great 17th-century English composer Henry Purcell and a useful teaching piece. Lachrymae, subtitled ‘Reflections on a Theme of Dowland’, is a tribute to a still earlier predecessor, the lutenist John Dowland; arranged by the composer shortly before his death from its original viola and piano version, it is immensely moving. The early Matinées Musicales, based on the music of Rossini, is an attractive piece, and the Simple Symphony for string orchestra, based on tunes written by the composer in childhood, is a useful element in string orchestra repertoire. Britten’s Variations on a Theme of Frank Bridge, written in 1937, serves as a brilliant tribute to his teacher, and his Piano Concerto and Violin Concerto come from the same period. His Cello Symphony was written in 1963 for his friend, the Russian cellist Mstislav Rostropovich.

Vocal and Choral Music

Britten was strongly influenced in his music and in his life by the tenor Peter Pears. For him he wrote a quantity of songs, including the splendid Serenade for tenor, horn and strings and the evocative Nocturne (both incomparable settings of the words of various English poets), as well as several other settings of poets (from Michelangelo to Thomas Hardy) for tenor and piano. His folksong arrangements have pleased a wide audience. Major choral works include the War Requiem, which combines the text of the Latin Requiem with the war poems of Wilfred Owen and forms an expression of Britten’s own pacifism. His Ceremony of Carols, settings accompanied by solo harp and designed, as were some other works, for boys’ voices, marked his return from America to wartime England in 1942.

Chamber Music

Britten’s chamber music includes a cello sonata and three cello suites for his friend Rostropovich, a fine suite for the Welsh harpist Osian Ellis, and Nocturnal after John Dowland for the guitarist Julian Bream. Of his three numbered string quartets, Quartet No 2 was written to mark the 250th anniversary of the death of Purcell, who provides the quartet’s inspiration.