Instruments of the Orchestra

Late in 1945, Basil Wright and the Crown Film Unit commissioned from Benjamin Britten the soundtrack for a film they were planning to be called 'Instruments of the Orchestra', which was to be part of a new post Second World War educational drive, initiated by Muir Mathieson and featuring the London Symphony Orchestra conducted by Malcolm Sargent. Britten subsequently published the music under it's more famous title A Young Person's Guide to the Orchestra. Given that the purpose of the film was to introduce a general audience, and in particular children, to the various instrumental groups of the orchestra, it was thought necessary to have what is in effect a spoken 'narration' to be written jointly by Eric Crozier, who had produced Britten's sensational operatic debut Peter Grimes the previous June, and Montagu Slater who had written the opera's libretto. Britten himself, inevitably, got involved. Nothing can detract from the absolute genius of the music. Also included is a CD of the first ever recording in October 1946 with Sargent and the Liverpool Philharmonic; the London Symphony was apparently 'unavailable'. But Britten's own 1963 recording (without any narration), once again with the London Symphony Orchestra - the Fugue of which I used in my 1967 film Britten and His Festival - remains the definitive account of this prodigious work.