REVIEWS 783 Pyke, Cameron. Benjamin Britten and Russia. Aldeburgh Studies in Music, 11. The Boydell Press, Woodbridge, 2016. xvi + 367 pp. Illustrations. Music examples. Tables. Notes. Appendices. Bibliography and sources. Index.£25.00. Britten’s friendship with Russian musicians such as Rostropovich, Vishnevskaia and Richter is well known to those with a more than superficial interest in music. Much has been written about episodes of their personal relations, but relatively little about the influence of Russian music on Britten’s throughout most of his life. The great merit of the book under review is the scrupulous detail, not least through copious annotation, with which the author even-handedly paints the rather complex picture of Britten’s constant admiration for Russian culture. In the first chapter, ‘Earliest and Lifelong Russophilia’, Pyke describes Britten’s attempts to resist the domination of Sibelius rather than Chaikovskii over interwar English music by creating his own counter version of modernism (p. 7), although throughout his life he felt himself an outsider from selfproclaimed modernity, finding by the mid-1930s inspiration in what he saw as a single Russian musical continuum from Chaikovskii to Shostakovich (despite a blind spot for Musorgskii’s genius). Chaikovskii’s ballets in particular influenced Britten extensively between 1935 and 1941, a time when snobbery was rife in Western Europe, provoking Stravinskii, who had loved Chaikovskii’s works from childhood, to make a famous public declaration, borne out in several of his own works. The second chapter is ‘Britten and Shostakovich, 1934–63’, in which the author presents a nuanced view of the often simplified and even distorted relationship of two composers who both regarded themselves as heirs to the Western musical tradition, and who late in their lives were united by a preoccupation with death. Aware of each other’s work relatively early on, by 1965 they had become friends. In chapter three Pyke addresses what he considers ‘perhaps the most elusive of Britten’s various musical engagements with Russia’, his relationship with the music of Prokof´ev (p. 84). Britten and Pears sought out the Russian’s scores on their visits to the Soviet Union after Stalin’s, and Prokof´ev’s, deaths, respecting his range and brilliance, particularly as a result of later friendships with performing musicians who had known the composer and who advocated his work. Actual compositional links between them, however, appear to be tenuous, although Britten was by nature always open to influence from outside sources, and in his later works his apparent ‘creative reference to Prokofiev was sufficiently assimilated to reflect and stimulate existing features of his musical language’ (p. 107). SEER, 97, 4, OCTOBER 2019 784 The fourth chapter, ‘Britten and Stravinsky’, tells the story of a relationship characterized by Pyke as ‘both unpredictable and ambiguous […] personally and musically’ (p. 120). Stravinskii had attained world fame with his first three ballets: ‘The Firebird’, which Britten respected highly; ‘Petrushka, to which he seems to have made a conscious reference in The Prince of the Pagodas (p. 130), and The Rite of Spring, which he at first found ‘bewildering and terrifying […] but incredibly marvellous & arresting’ (p. 20, n. 6). Later he was far more critical, and even jealous, turning more to his increasing friendship with Shostakovich whose opera Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk, like Britten’s War Requiem, was criticized severely by Stravinskii. ‘Hospitality and Politics’ is the theme of the next chapter, and clearly relevant to the relations between Britten and Russia during the composer’s lifetime, from the earliest visits to the Soviet Union to the peak in 1960–63, and final disillusion with the rigid bureaucracy of a country he had somewhat idealized. The composer’s habit of writing music for specific occasions and performers also led to some clashes with Soviet officialdom, especially after the extrovert Rostropovich’s espousal of Solzhenitsyn’s cause. His (mainly epistolary) friendship with the even shyer Shostakovich, however, appears to have been genuine, each recognizing the other’s qualities and problems. Chapter six, ‘Pushkin and Performance’, discusses Britten’s Pushkin cycle, The Poet’s Echo, stimulated, perhaps, in different ways by Pears (who had far greater knowledge of Russian than his friend) and Rostropovich whose advocacy took many...