Wednesday, November 13, 2019

Opera Chicken Casserole


Many LGBTs simply love opera so it should come as no surprise a couple of the greatest of the English Opera Houses were LGBT heroes. This version of a Chicken Cordon Bleu casserole is dedicated to Benjamin Britten and Peter Pears. 


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.



Bake for 25 to 30 minutes or until heated through and lightly golden. 
 


Servings 4:
Calories 287 Calories from Fat 114 Total Fat 13g Cholesterol 87mg
Sodium 553mg


For Your table



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..I cook!

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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), PhantasyOp. 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



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