- Published: 7 February 2013
- ISBN: 9781409038245
- Imprint: Cornerstone Digital
- Format: EBook
- Pages: 544
Benjamin Britten
A Life For Music
- Published: 7 February 2013
- ISBN: 9781409038245
- Imprint: Cornerstone Digital
- Format: EBook
- Pages: 544
[A] fine biography... Powell has a more personal touch... takes a more literary approach, and is good at relating the vocal pieces to their sources.
Daily Telegraph
A sensible, well-written book by an author who is a literary scholar: this is the biography to choose if you are new to Britten and want an introduction to his life.
Country Life
Neil Powell is a poet, and it shows. Fluent… intimate… psychologically adept… [Powell does] an exceptional job of bringing this strange, neurotic and evasive man to life.
Bryan Appleyard, Sunday Times
Powell carries the torch into the present, naming those singers now performing the work anew, painting a portrait of the Aldeburgh festival as it is today. His account has air and light, and brings alive the sense of landscape – the East Anglian coast, the marshes, the wind and waves – which have coloured so much of Britten's music.
Observer
Powell has a certain ease as a writer… and an unerring eye for the unexpected revealing quotation.
TLS
Powell’s biography provides a reliable, uncluttered narrative, useful for Britten beginners.
Financial Times
This concise and well-written biography draws effectively on almost every available major source to provide a valuable synthesis of modern scholarship and opinion … This book comes with many rare photographs, a very useful bibliography, and is well indexed … For a well-written distillation of Britten’s life and art, Neil Powell’s biography can be thoroughly recommended, particularly to those who want an accessible and comprehensive account as a preface to further study.
Classical Music magazine
Tightly focused... sympathetic. Powell lives in Suffolk and has a strong understanding of the composer’s cultural rootedness in that part of the world.
Economist