Benjamin Britten Lord Harewood called it "the first genuinely successful British opera, Gilbert and Sullivan apart, since Purcell." Dismayed by the in-fighting among the company, Cross, Britten and Pears severed their ties with Sadler's Wells in December 1945, going on to found what was to become the English Opera Group. 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
Tom Sutcliffe (opera critic) Opera, the Aldeburgh Festival, Opera Holland Park, La Monnaie, the Edinburgh Festival, Opera Australia, Frankfurt Opera, the Theater an der Wien in Vienna, and the Teatro di San Carlo in Naples. His appearances on television have included a 1991 film about Benjamin Britten in the BBC's "J'Accuse" series. In 1994 he took an important part in Lindsay Anderson's last film, an entertaining and autobiographical documentary titled "Is That All There Is?". He has twice been elected to a Leverhulme Trust Fellowship, and from 1999 to 2009 chaired the Music section of The Critics' Circle, of which he is President until