Page 252 - Media Coverage Book - 75th Aldeburgh Festival 2024

06 June 2024

‘If you want to know how to move an audience, I can show you how

to do that’ - Gweneth Ann Rand interview

Hattie Butterworth
Thursday, June 6, 2024

Soprano Gweneth Ann Rand collaborates with young artists in three concerts

for Suffolk's Aldeburgh Festival. She shares with Opera Now her insight into

vulnerability, pedagogy and the importance of community

It was one of the warmest days of the year so far. Looking out across the River Alde in the late
afternoon sun, colours and gentle sounds surrounded the artistic metropolis of Snape Maltings.
Sarah Angliss’s opera Giant opened 2023’s Aldeburgh Festival on 5 June with soprano Gweneth

Ann Rand still being one of my strongest memories of the production.

She played Rooker – the androgynous manager of the Irish giant Charles Byrne, a human exhibit,
curiosity or ‘freak’ during 18th century London. His body remained on display, against his wishes,

until 2016.

‘There's so many different layers to that role,’ Rand reflects on the opera’s journey. ‘It was a

chance to play in a way that I haven't played in a long time. For that, it was an absolute gift.’