Page 292 - Media Coverage Book - 75th Aldeburgh Festival 2024

Seventy five years later, Stalin’s successor, Vladimir Putin, is still trying to strangle
independence, this time not Berlin’s but Ukraine’s. But alongside the reed beds and watery
landscape of the Suffolk coast, the successors of Britten and Pears have been celebrating their
own milestone, their own decades-long independence. It has been quite an improbable
journey, one shadowed in its earlier years by the impact of the Cold War. This sadly has been
the case this year too as a new Cold War far away to the east affects so many aspects of
European cultural life including programme-making alongside the pebble beaches on the
North Sea.

It is extraordinary that all those post-war years ago in an isolated part of the eastern
extremities of England, a festival was conjured into existence. The wonder is that it happened
at all. Of course, the quiet but determined magicians who pulled it off were Britten and Pears.
The composer born in nearby Lowestoft and his singer friend from Surrey had been together
since 1937. In 1947, they persuaded their local Suffolk neighbours and their wide circle of
artistic contacts to give it a go. The challenges were considerable, not least finding suitable
venues. This proved fortuitous as a pattern was set in which local halls and churches were
used and later supplemented by the old Maltings in nearby Snape, which was converted into a
concert hall in the late 1960s. With Britten as composer in residence, new productions
followed year after year with him often also a performer alongside Pears. Never a parochial
festival, international performers (including at the height of the Cold War the Russian cellist
Rostropovich) and influences (from India via Japan to Indonesia) became staples.

From the start, the festival was refreshingly innovative, mixing song recitals with early music
programmes, jazz and folk music (using several hundred local children on one occasion), as
well as poetry readings, celebrity lectures (by the likes of the novelist E. M. Forster), live
drama and exhibitions of paintings. Although, over time, music has come to predominate the
annual summer festival – which concluded last Sunday – it has continued to offer a rich mix
of contemporary arts.

The organisers have never stood still and this year was no different under the leadership of
Roger Wright (who was knighted in the King’s Birthday Honours last week). Four key artists
– composers and performers respectively – were deployed across the festival’s two
weeks. Judith Weir (the outgoing Master of the King’s Music) was principal guest composer
and new pieces of her music flowed sinuously through a number of concerts. The
distinguished German cellist, Alban Gerhardt, and the inspiring young British violinist,
Daniel Pioro, gave brilliant solo recitals including of Bach and Britten alongside concertos
(one by the Korean Unsuk Chin, another featured composer) with the visiting London
Philharmonic and BBC Scottish Symphony orchestras. The orchestras delivered grandly
themselves: Mahler’s 4th and Bruckner’s massive 7th symphony (both recorded live by the
BBC). New productions of works by Britten were highlights, most notably his music drama
“Curlew River” (filmed in and around Blythburgh Church for broadcast on BBC4 in the
Autumn).

As always, there was nothing parochial about the programme as instanced by Vox Lumines
from Belgium singing Purcell’s “Fairy-Queen”, a performance of Kanze Motomasa’s Noh
play and a cycle of songs by Messiaen. And no-one who attended it will forget the brio of a
chamber music recital dominated by the Kanneh-Mason family last Friday evening.