Page 324 - Media Coverage Book - 75th Aldeburgh Festival 2024

that came under Clement Attlee’s Labour administration. “There’s this sense that
politics had torn Europe apart, and art was going to be involved in putting it back
together,” said Christopher Hilton, the head of archive and library at Britten Pears
Arts.

The first editions of Aldeburgh Festival were modest, revolving around the Jubilee
Hall, a small, multipurpose red brick hall in the middle of town that Britten and
Pears occasionally rented to play badminton.

Knowing that his music would be performed in a venue with limited space for
musicians and audience shaped Britten’s compositions. In letters, he referred to the
hall as “the real home” of his comic opera “Albert Herring,” which he brought to the
festival in 1948, having premiered it at the Glyndebourne festival the year before.
That sense of the site-specific work remains. Last month, on the pebble beach at
Aldeburgh, Xhosa Cole and Mark Sanders created a collaboration “between
saxophone, drums and sea.”

The actor Robert Speight, writing at the time of the first festival, remarked that “no
one seemed able to explain where the large audiences came from. The Parish Church
was equally full for a recital of verse and music at 11 in the morning as it was for a
concert by Britten and Pears or the Zorian Quartet at 6 in the evening.” So it has
continued; a recent Thursday morning piano recital by Rolf Hind — with music by
Chin and Weir, alongside works by Ravel, Koechlin, Messiaen and Hind — drew a
healthy crowd.
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