A
casserole with the great tastes of Chicken, Ham, Mushrooms, and Swiss
cheese beautifully baked together. Here I cooked the chicken breasts
myself, however, you can use canned cooked chicken if you wish or
even rotisserie chicken. Whatever works best for you.
Ingredients:
2 cups (9 ounces) shredded cooked chicken
4
ounces diced ham
1
cup broccoli florets
½
small curd cottage cheese
5
oz sour cream
½
cup shredded white cheese
2
tablespoons margarine, melted
1
tablespoon Dijon mustard
¼
tsp. pepper
½
cup shredded Swiss cheese
Directions:
Preheat
oven to 350
degrees F.
Coat a 9x12-inch baking dish with cooking spray.
Place
the chicken in the bottom of a baking dish. Loosely pile the ham over the
chicken.
Cook
the broccoli until just underdone.
In
a medium bowl, combine cottage cheese, sour cream, margarine,
mustard, and pepper; mix well. Stir in ¼ cup Swiss cheese and
broccoli. Spread this sauce over the ham, then sprinkle with
remaining cheese.
Roll
out crescent dough and place on top. Brush with egg wash.
Servings 4:
Calories 287 Calories from Fat 114 Total Fat 13g Cholesterol 87mg
Sodium 553mg
For
Your table
socialslave
To
satisfy and restore.
To
nourish, support and maintain.
To
gratify, spoil, comfort and please,
to
nurture, assist, and sustain
…..I
cook!
Please
buy slave's cookbook:
The
Little Black Book of Indiscreet Recipes by Dan White
http://www.amazon.com/dp/B00F315Y4I/ref=cm_sw_r_tw_dp_vAT4sb0934RTMvia @amazon
====================
Benjamin
Britten and Peter Pears
Living
in nearly 40 years of passionate romance, British composer Benjamin
Britten and tenor Peter Pears brought heat to the opera house.
In 1976,
Britten asked a publisher friend, to "tell the truth about Peter
and me" in the form of releasing 365 love letters exchanged
between the pair, from when they first met in 1937 up to that year.
The two loved each other's artistry. Britten called his lover
"potentially the greatest singer alive."
The
feeling was mutual. "It is you who have given me everything …
I am here as your mouthpiece and I live in your music," Pears
replied.
The
two traveled the world as partners in life and music, performing in
concert halls and for Holocaust survivors. “I live for Friday, &
you. My man — my beloved man,” wrote Britten, who died of
congestive heart failure in 1976. Pears died of a heart attack 10
years later.
Edward
Benjamin Britten, (1913 – 1976) was an English composer, conductor,
and pianist. He was by all accounts, perhaps the greatest composer of
20th-century British classical music, with a range of works including
opera, other vocal music, orchestral and chamber pieces. His
best-known works include the opera Peter
Grimes (1945),
the War
Requiem (1962)
and the orchestral showpiece The
Young Person's Guide to the Orchestra (1945).
Born
in Suffolk, the son of a dentist, Britten showed talent from an early
age. He studied at the Royal College of Music in London. Britten
first came to public attention with the a cappella choral work A
Boy was Born in
1934. With the premiere of Peter
Grimes in
1945, he leaped to international fame. Over the next 28 years, he
wrote 14 more operas, establishing himself as one of the leading
20th-century composers in the genre. In addition to large-scale
operas for Wells
and Covent Garden,
he wrote "chamber operas" suitable for performance in
smaller venues. Among the best known of these is The
Turn of the Screw (1954).
Recurring themes in his operas include the struggle of an outsider
against a hostile society and the corruption of innocence.
Britten's
other works range from orchestral to choral, solo vocal, chamber and
instrumental as well as film music. He took a great interest in
writing music for children and amateur performers. He often composed
with particular performers in mind. His most frequent and important
muse was his personal
and professional partner, the tenor Peter Pears. Britten
was a celebrated pianist and conductor, performing many of his own
works in concert and on record.
Together
with Pears, Britten founded the annual Aldeburgh Festival in 1948,
and he was responsible for the creation of the Snape Maltings concert
hall in 1967. In his last year, he was the first composer to be given
a life peerage.
Britten
was born in a fishing port in Suffolk, on the east coast of England.
When
Britten was three months old he contracted pneumonia and nearly died.
The illness left him with a damaged heart, and doctors warned his
parents that he would probably never lead a normal life. He recovered
better than they expected, and as a boy, he was an excellent tennis
and cricket player.
To
his mother's great delight he was an outstandingly musical child,
unlike his siblings. Edith gave the young Britten his first lessons
in piano. He made his first attempts at composition when he was five.
He started professional piano lessons when he was seven years old,
and three years later began to play the viola. He was one of the last
composers brought up on live
music:
his father refused to have a record player or, later, a radio in the
house.
In
the English provinces of the early 20th century, distinctions of
social class were taken very seriously. Britten described his family
as "very ordinary middle class". Music was the principal
means to maintain the family's social standing, inviting the pillars
of the local community to musical soirées at the house.
Growing
up and attending school he composed prolifically. When his Simple
Symphony, based
on these writings, was recorded in 1956, Britten
wrote this for the sleeve note:
Once
upon a time, there was a prep-school boy. ... He was quite an
ordinary little boy ... he loved cricket, only quite liked football
(although he kicked a pretty "corner"); he adored
mathematics, got on all right with history, was scared by Latin
Unseen; he behaved fairly well, only ragged the recognized amount, so
that his contacts with the cane or the slipper were happily rare
(although one nocturnal expedition to stalk ghosts left its marks
behind); he worked his way up the school slowly and steadily, until
at the age of thirteen, he reached that pinnacle of importance and
grandeur, never to be quite equaled in later days: the head of the
Sixth, head-prefect, and Victor Ludorum. But – there was one
curious thing about this boy: he wrote music. His friends bore with
it, his enemies kicked a bit but not for long (he was quite tough),
the staff couldn't object if his work and games didn't suffer. He
wrote lots of it, reams and reams of it.
In
1924, he heard Frank Bridge's orchestral poem The Sea. It was the
first substantial piece of modern music he had ever encountered, and
he was, in his own phrase, "knocked sideways" by it.
He
was introduced to the composer who was impressed with the boy.
Britten was invited to come to London to take private lessons.
Britten would go on to his public school but would make regular
day-trips to London to study composition with Bridge.
He
won a composition scholarship at the Royal College of Music in London
from
1930 to 1933, He won the Sullivan Prize for composition, the Cobbett
Prize for chamber music, and was twice winner of the Ernest Farrar
Prize for composition.
The
first of Britten's compositions to attract wide attention were
composed while at the RCM: the
Sinfonietta, Op. 1 (1932), Phantasy, Op.
2, and
a set of choral variations A
Boy was Born,
written in 1933 for
the BBC Singers.
Britten
became a member of the film unit's small group of regular
contributors, another of whom was W.
H. Auden. Auden
was a considerable influence on Britten, encouraging him to widen his
aesthetic, intellectual and political horizons, and also to come to
terms with his homosexuality. Auden was, as David Matthews puts it,
"cheerfully and guiltlessly promiscuous"; Britten,
puritanical and conventional by nature, was sexually repressed.
In
the three years from 1935 to 1937, Britten wrote nearly 40 scores for
the theatre, cinema, and radio.
In
1937 there were two events of huge importance in Britten's life: his
mother died, and he met the tenor Peter
Pears.
Although Britten was extraordinarily devoted to his mother and was
devastated at her death, it was also liberation for him. Only after
that did he begin to engage in emotional relationships. Later in the
year, he got to know Pears who quickly became Britten's musical
inspiration and close friend. Britten's first work for him was
composed within weeks of their meeting, a setting of Emily Brontë's
poem, "A
thousand gleaming fires",
for tenor and strings.
During
1937 Britten composed Variations
on a Theme of Frank Bridge for
string orchestra, described by Matthews as the first of Britten's
works to become a popular classic. It was a success in North America,
with performances in Toronto, New York, Boston, Chicago, and San
Francisco.
In
April 1939 Britten and Pears sailed to North America. Their friend
Christopher Isherwood had traveled to the US three months previously.
Britten
and Pears from then until Britten's death were partners in both their
professional and personal lives. When the Second World War began,
Britten and Pears turned for advice to the British embassy in
Washington and were told that they should remain in the US
as artistic
ambassadors.
They
became friends with the composer Aaron Copland. In 1940 Britten
composed Seven
Sonnets of Michelangelo,
the first of many song cycles for Pears.
Having
arrived back in Britain, Britten and Pears applied for recognition
as conscientious
objectors;
Britten was initially allowed only non-combatant service in the
military, but on appeal, he gained unconditional exemption.
After
the death of his mother in 1937, he had used the money she bequeathed
him to buy the Old Mill in Snape, Suffolk which became his country
home. He spent much of his time there in 1944 working on the
opera Peter
Grimes. Pears
joined Sadler's Wells Opera Company. Peter
Grimes opened
in June 1945 and was hailed by public and critics; its box-office
takings matched or exceeded those for La
bohème and Madame
Butterfly,
which were staged during the same season. The opera administrator
Lord Harewood called it "the first genuinely successful British
opera, Gilbert and Sullivan apart, since Purcell."
A month after the opening of Peter Grimes, Britten and Yehudi Menuhin
went to Germany to give recitals to concentration camp survivors.
What they saw, at Belsen most of all, so shocked Britten that he
refused to talk about it until towards the end of his life, when he
told Pears that it had colored everything he had written since.
Britten recovered his joie de vivre for The
Young Person's Guide to the Orchestra (1945),
written for an educational film, Instruments of the Orchestra. It
became, and remained, his most often played and popular work.
While
on one of their tours, Pears came up with the idea of mounting a
festival in Aldeburgh, where Britten had moved, and which became his
principal place of residence for the rest of his life.
The
Aldeburgh Festival was launched in June 1948. The festival was an
immediate success and became an annual event that has continued into
the 21st century. New works by Britten featured in almost every
festival until his death in 1976, including the premieres of his
operas A
Midsummer Night's Dream in1960
and Death
in Venice in
1973.
The
Turn of the Screw was
an unqualified success; together with Peter Grimes it became, and
remained, one of the two most frequently performed of Britten's
operas.
One
of the best known of Britten's works, the
War Requiem,
was premiered in 1962. Matthews writes, "With the War Requiem
Britten reached the apex of his reputation: it was almost universally
hailed as a masterpiece." Shostakovich told Rostropovich that he
believed it to be "the greatest work of the twentieth century".
Rather
than just listing one success after another, allow me to point out
the dynamic of having two genius', at the height of their abilities
producing their best efforts to the other fueled by the energy of
their deep love. Song and singer pouring forth such power had to have
had an effect on the audiences. Their combined effect on English
opera can not be overstated.
In
September 1970 Britten started work on Death
in Venice. At
an early stage in composition Britten was told by his doctors that a
heart operation was essential if he was to live for more than two
years. He was determined to finish the opera and worked urgently to
complete it before going into surgery. His long-term colleague Colin
Graham wrote:
“Perhaps
of all his works, this one went deepest into Britten's own soul:
there are extraordinary cross-currents of affinity between himself,
his own state of health and mind, and Peter Pears, who must have had
to tear himself in three in order to reconstitute himself as the
principal character.”
After
the completion of the opera, Britten went into the hospital and was
operated on to replace a failing heart valve. The replacement was
successful, but he suffered a slight stroke, affecting his right
hand. This brought his career as a performer to an end. In November,
Britten realized that he could no longer compose. On his 63rd
birthday, he requested a champagne party and invited his friends and
family, to say their goodbyes.
I
heard of his death ... and took a long walk in total silence through
gently falling snow across a frozen lake, which corresponded exactly
to the inexpressible sense of numbness at such a loss. The world is
colder and lonelier without the presence of our supreme creator of
music.
Peter
Maxwell Davies, 1977
Britten
died of congestive heart failure. His funeral service was held at
Aldeburgh Parish Church three days later. The authorities at
Westminster Abbey had offered burial there, but Britten had made it
clear that he wished his grave to be side by side with that, in due
course, of Pears.
St. Peter
and St Paul's Church, Aldeburgh, Suffolk
No comments:
Post a Comment