United for Britten

Scotland is not alone, of course, in celebrating the centenary of one the 20th century's greatest composers. The anniversary is being marked worldwide under the banner Britten 100: Music for Everyone, and on the designated website you'll find testimonials from the likes of Patrick Stewart about his secret desire to sing the countertenor lead in A Midsummer Night's Dream; and from David Attenborough about his nerves when meeting Britten to commission the TV opera Owen Wingrave. There are event listings from Kentucky to Karlsruhe to Kyoto.

Britten himself never would have imagined that his legacy might reach quite so far. When he died in 1976 he received glowing obituaries in the UK broadsheets but his music was only really known by aficionados. For most of his life, despite earning respect and a great deal of money for his compositions, he chose to keep a fairly discreet public profile. Part of that had to do with the illegality (until 1967) of his homosexual relationship with the tenor Peter Pears, and the couple chose to make their home in the sleepy Suffolk fishing town of Aldeburgh rather than in London. But the seclusion was more than just practical: outside of a tight knot of friends and colleagues Britten was, by many accounts, a shy and removed character. He suffered regular bouts of self-doubt over his work ("my bloody opera stinks and that's all there is to it," he told Pears in 1944, the year before premiering his residing masterpiece Peter Grimes) and his health was similarly fragile.

He was also an unequivocally local lad. "I'm English," he said while living in New York in the early 1940s. "And as a composer I suppose I feel I want more definite roots than other people." He believed "in associations, in backgrounds"; his music is infused with a palpable sense of place, of landscape, of the sea, of people. Perhaps in a roundabout way that's what makes its appeal quite so lasting and quite so universal.

Nowadays Britten's legacy is managed by the Britten-Pears Foundation in Aldeburgh, which works to "reveal Britten's genius" by hosting "the most complete composer archive in the world". Within the past year a number of high-profile biographies have been added to an already sizeable range, and orchestras and opera companies around the UK have featured the composer's works heavily throughout their seasons.

Do we risk Britten fatigue? Keyboardist/conductor Richard Egarr, associate artist of the Scottish Chamber Orchestra, thinks not. "Anniversary years like these give composers like Britten a chance to show their full range of wares," he says. "Not just their most popular pieces like Peter Grimes or the War Requiem, but more unusual repertoire too, like the Prelude and Fugue for Strings."

And the Britten fortnight does indeed showcase a decent range of works, from some of Britten's earliest (the BBC SSO performs his Opus 4, the Simple Symphony, based on fragments composed as a young teenager) to his latest (the Scottish Ensemble performs the cantata Phaedra, written for Janet Baker in 1975). On April 18 the BBC SSO pairs Britten's largest purely orchestral work, the Sinfonia da Requiem, with the Ninth Symphony by Shostakovich, with whom Britten became friends in later life. On April 20 the RSNO and RSNO Junior Chorus stage a Children's Classics Concert of the eternally popular Young Person's Guide to the Orchestra, a set of orchestral variations based on a Rondeau by Henry Purcell and designed to show off the colours and character of the orchestra.

Some of the most intriguing programmes of the fortnight come from the Scottish Ensemble and the SCO, who consider Britten's music in the context of composers who inspired him and composers whom he inspired. The series ends with an SCO concert conducted by composer George Benjamin: he frames Britten's magnificent Serenade for Tenor, Horn and Strings with Harrison Birtwistle's 1978 ensemble work Carmen arcadiae mechanicae perpetuum, Martin Suckling's 2011 SCO commission storm, rose, tiger and the pristine classicism of Mozart's 40th Symphony. The tenor soloist is John Mark Ainsley, who on April 21 explores Britten's folksong settings in an SCO programme also featuring Schubert Impromptus from pianist Tom Poster.

Meanwhile Egarr's SCO billing on April 18 and 19 gathers music by Britten and Purcell, the composer from whom "Britten learned an infinite amount," he says. "Purcell's influence on Britten was profound, and falls mainly into two categories. The first has to do with form: the chaconnes, passacaglias, ground basses t. There's always something a bit skewiff about what Purcell does. He might shorten or lengthen phrase lengths, or he might add some other irregularity that throws everything slightly off kilter. A bad composer builds a square house on these kind of forms. A good composer plays around with them. That's what Purcell did, and that's what Britten learned to do from Purcell."

He adds: "They also shared a masterful way of treating text. Britten inherited Purcell's baroque approach to word colouring, where important words are decorated with melismas or harmonic shading.

"He didn't go in for the long lines that you find in romantic music – that's true right from some of his earliest music, like the wonderful song cycle On this Island, through to his final opera Death in Venice."

Egarr will also be treating the S CO Chorus to his own arrangements of four Purcell Catches, cheeky little numbers that he describes as "basically very rude, triple-X vocal rounds that were exceedingly popular during the 17th century. Purcell wrote about 40 of them: they're very difficult to sing, and would have probably been the sport of drunken songmen from Westminster Cathedral.

"Nowadays the lay-clerks of any self-respecting cathedral choir head to the pub after rehearsal; it was no different back then."

Every birthday party needs its boozy singsong.

Britten Fortnight runs from April 18-27 in Glasgow, Edinburgh, Perth and St Andrews.