Benjamin Britten's secondary, but none the less significant and complementary, role as performer of other men's music is well known today and justly admired: his association—one might almost say his self-identification—with composers such as Mozart, Schubert, Wolf and Mahler, either as solo pianist, accompanist or conductor, are distinguished by a most compelling intensity of personal feeling for the music, objectified, as it were, by a cool, scientific clarity of musical presentation. His performances are supremely creative: the composer nourishes the performer in him, and vice versa, which provokes the reaction, as one admires an interpretative idea in the performance of a Mozart violin sonata or Schubert song partnered by Britten at the piano, ‘how Mozartian’ or ‘how Schubertian’ — and yet ‘how Brittenish’.