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WNO Youth Opera’s production of Paul Bunyan: ‘All that’s missing is Michael Palin in a trapper hat c1969.’ Photograph: Catherine Ashmore
WNO Youth Opera’s production of Paul Bunyan: ‘All that’s missing is Michael Palin in a trapper hat c1969.’ Photograph: Catherine Ashmore

Paul Bunyan; Proms 57 & 60; Proms Chamber Music 7 – review

This article is more than 10 years old
Wales Millennium Centre, Cardiff; Royal Albert Hall; Cadogan Hall, London
From Cardiff to Chile – and that new coin in your pocket – it seems that everyone's backing Britten

The first British currency to feature a composer – a £20 note emblazoned with Edward Elgar – is now compost. Elgar was shredded and put out to grass, numismatically speaking, in 2010. Tomorrow Benjamin Britten, who wrote nothing so popular as Land of Hope and Glory yet has been lionised extraordinarily in his centenary year, becomes the second to be honoured by the Royal Mint. He will hit our pockets in harder, jinglier fashion by way of a commemorative 50 pence piece.

The coin's heptagon shape and metal composition may better suit this less easily compostable composer. A phrase from his Serenade for Tenor, Horn and Strings (1943) appears on the new coin: "Blow, bugle, blow, set the wild echoes flying". You only have to see those clarion lines of Tennyson which Britten set so brilliantly to hear it, leaping in your mind's ear, sung by the composer's life-long partner, Peter Pears. (Is gay love also making its first appearance on a British coin?)

The strange possibility is that Britten, whose musical style is always hard to categorise, being at once outward looking yet conservative, could have headed towards the popular mainstream, as WNO Youth Opera's new production of Paul Bunyan reminded us last week. This 1941 work, with its uneven libretto by Auden, is an allegory of the birth of the New World set to music which – very nearly – has Broadway appeal.

In Cai Dyfan's stylish, folk-inspired landscape, the "virgin forest that is America" is eventually tamed by man, or men, into a familiar log-cabin cosiness complete with lumberjacks, check shirts and plenty of homespun heartiness. All that's missing is Michael Palin in a trapper hat c1969.

Throughout, a young boy witnesses the action from his iron bed, covered in a Stars and Stripes blanket. All is set within a snow-paquey early TV screen from which Stephen Fry, projected on film in the speaking role of Paul Bunyan himself, utters smooth, mysterious platitudes in a rather effective, slow American accent. We see only his eyes and nose and his dentally intriguing teeth. Who is Paul Bunyan? A benign if creepy giant who grew as tall as the Empire State Building and had a stride of 3.7 miles, which tells you all you need to know. Walt Disney filled in any gaps in his 1958 cartoon version.

With numbers, choruses and bluesy ballads, Bunyan is an operetta but feels closer to a musical. Britten never used that talent in quite the same way in later works, despite glimmers in the cabaret songs and elsewhere. Negative early reviews may have stung him: no one could be sure what the work was supposed to be, not helped by the lack of a clear-cut, upbeat ending. It has never quite caught on.

WNO Youth Opera worked wonders with this intractable piece, thanks especially to the high standards of the large ensemble cast, chorus and orchestra, Martin Constantine's imaginative direction and the well-paced conducting of Alice Farnham. Britten wrote Bunyan for students at Columbia University, New York. Hearing it in Cardiff sung by fresh, undeveloped voices rather than experienced opera singers transformed it. The problems of the libretto receded – is it so much worse than many other opera texts? The versatility and catchiness of the music were given full rein.

The opening chorus, not so far from the big-hearted style John Adams would use 40 years later at the start of Nixon in China, sounded magnificent as delivered by the four-score members of Only Boys Aloud. This choir was formed in 2010 to encourage 14- to 19-year-old young men in South Wales to sing. All the tunes are catchy, from emotional ballads such as Tiny's elegy for her dead mother, to the Western Union Boy's rhythmically witty A telegram from overseas. Elgan Llyr Thomas (Johnny Inkslinger) and Vanessa Bowers (Tiny) led the cast, but this was a fine team effort.

One particular sound carried Britten's voice through from Bunyan to Billy Budd (1951), which provided Glyndebourne with the choice for its annual Proms appearance: the alto saxophone. It adds blue-note colours to Bunyan, and a decade on in Budd he used it like a low, muffled animal moan, dragging a warning through long orchestral lines, preparing us for tragedy. Andrew Davis conducted the festival forces – including the London Philharmonic Orchestra, Mark Padmore as the cerebral Vere, Brindley Sherratt as an icy Claggart and Jacques Imbrailo reprising his lean, poetic Budd – in a semi-staging which cleverly suggested the decks and quarter-decks of HMS Indomitable. As on so many nights at this year's Proms, the silence at the end bore testament to the musical and dramatic force.

Britten is everywhere else right now. On Thursday Peter Grimes will be screened at 70 cinemas around the country in the beach staging from this year's Aldeburgh festival. Opera North is about to open a Britten season with its own Grimes. You could catch Billy Budd in Chile, The Turn of the Screw in Germany, The Rape of Lucretia in Jordan. Or, if you like, you can simply spin him in your pocket.

Two mighty non-Britten Proms deserve mention: Mark Elder achieved Wagnerian heaven in Parsifal, superbly played by the Hallé – a partnership which has just won a Gramophone award for Elgar's The Apostles. Check online for the full, excellent Parsifal lineup or hear the performance before 10pm tonight on iPlayer. And in Proms Chamber Music 7 the Signum Quartet, with the formidable pianist Christian Ihle Hadland, made air and light out of Brahms's angst-laden Piano Quintet in F minor. The Signums also played Elizabeth Maconchy's beautifully shaped String Quartet No 3 (1938). Born six years earlier than Britten, Maconchy died in 1994. The Royal Mint might like to take note.

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