ABSTRACT
Benjamin Britten's earliest known link with Russia was a piece for brass ensemble and percussion that he wrote in early 1936. This work, Britten's only opus for brass ensemble, was entitled Russian Funeral, and its first performance was on 8 March 1936 at the Westminster Theatre in London. It is based on proletarian songs played at the funeral of the demonstrators massacred outside the Winter Palace on 'Bloody Sunday', January 1905. Shostakovich was later to quote the same songs in his Eleventh Symphony. Shostakovich was also the composer that Britten most admired among his contemporaries. A performance of Shostakovich's ill-fated opera Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk had been Britten's first experience of a large-scale work by this composer. Britten also mentioned how much he had always admired Stravinsky's The Firebird, another very Russian resonance that almost certainly went back to his teenage years.
