Sir Simon Rattle and Ian Bostridge at the Lucerne Festival

According to Gramophone Magazine, Ian Bostridge possesses the “particular gift for lighting texts from within, and projecting so immediately their images, comes into its own arrestingly in the Nocturne”. The 1958 song cycle, for which Britten selected English poems from over several centuries, demands a profound psychological sensitivity in its subtle mood shifts. The songs range from peaceful dream visions – such as a “beautiful boy” picking fruit in the moonlight to the tender sounds of a harp (in the third song) – to nightmarish memories of the September Massacre during the French Revolution (in the fifth song), introduced by thunderous timpani and accompanied by a lament from the cor anglais. Compared to its sister work, the Serenade for Tenor, Horn and Strings, composed 15 years earlier, the scenes in the Nocturne seem much more disturbing. “It won’t be madly popular because it is the strangest and remotest thing – but then dreams are strange and remote,” Britten said about the piece.

“World, good night” – this verse from Bach’s cantata “Es ist nun aus mit meinem Leben” (Now my life is ended) could also be a title for Anton Bruckner’s Ninth Symphony. Composed literally on his deathbed and dedicated to “dear God”, the composer utilises the work to deal with questions of the hereafter. His monumental style, characterised by layers of sound and exhilarating, wave-like crescendos, comes into its own here. At the same time, he incorporates telling quotations – from Mendelssohn’s Reformation Symphony and Wagner’s Parsifal – which hint at a longing for redemption and transfiguration. With the last completed movement, one of the composer’s most moving adagios, Bruckner bid “farewell to life” – he wrote these words above a gently descending chorale melody played by horns and tubas.