I didn't initially like Britten the first time I heard his music. When I was about 15, I was obsessed with learning as much classical music repertoire as possible. Having grown up in a household where Broadway musicals and the American Songbook were the tunes blasting from an old stereo, I wanted to dive into orchestral music as...an outsider. I listened to Peter Grimes for the first time and as a pre-Glee obsessive musical theatre teenager, I thought the recitative lines where so strange. It sounded almost like morris code with the words "Grimes" and "crime" thrown in every so often to advance the plot. I dismissed the whole thing and went on to another composer. It wasn't really until a conversation I had my senior year of high school that made me rethink Britten.