Page 276 - Media Coverage Book - 75th Aldeburgh Festival 2024

Roderick Williams (centre) in the 2017 festival’s semi-staged Billy Budd, one of Roger Wright’s
highlights. Photograph: Sam Murray-Sutton

Ever since Britten’s death in 1976, the festival has had a distinguished series of
musicians who were part of the artistic leadership team, including Mstislav
Rostropovich, Simon Rattle, Murray Perahia and Oliver Knussen, but there has always
been an awareness of carrying on what Britten and his partner, Peter Pears, envisaged
when the festival began. “The original vision of what can music do in this area to
transform lives and bring communities together,” as Wright puts it. From the very
beginning, Britten had been at pains to include people of Aldeburgh in the festival,
composing such works as the “entertainment for young people” Let’s Make an Opera,
the children’s opera Noye’s Fludde and the cantata Saint Nicolas, specifically for
amateurs to perform there.

That relationship with the local community continues in the outreach projects that BPA
sponsors and initiates across Suffolk, taking music into a local prison, commissioning
young composers to write songs for schools, working with people with Parkinson’s
disease and dementia, or organising choirs and orchestras for all ages. All that came
into sharp focus during the Covid pandemic in 2020 and 2021, when live music across
Britain almost entirely disappeared. Wright and his team conjured up weekends of
short concerts, which included performers such as Antonio Pappano, Lawrence Power,
Ian Bostridge and Sheku and Isata Kanneh-Mason. Each programme was played twice
in the Maltings concert hall to socially distanced audiences; every one of them was sold
out.

At the BBC, Wright had, of course, overseen a far bigger, wider-ranging programme on
Radio 3 and at the Proms. That experience, and the criticism he received there, now
makes him tactfully understanding about the difficulties the current controller, Sam
Jackson, has been over his changes to the Radio 3 schedule, and concerns over the
possible direction the Proms might take in the future, well aware that Jackson is now