Page 538 - Media Coverage Book - 75th Aldeburgh Festival 2024

12 June 2024
A cosmic new piece by the Master of the King’s

Music is out of this world, plus the best of June’s

classical concerts

The Aldeburgh Festival continues to delight with astonishingly rich concerts, including the world
premiere of Judith Weir’s Planet
Ivan Hewett
12 June 2024 • 3:16pm

Ryan Wigglesworth conducting the Knussen Chamber Orchestra
Knussen Chamber Orchestra/ Aldeburgh Festival ★★★★☆

Bless the Aldeburgh Festival, which cheerfully defies the general climate of gloom and pinched
expectations. It flings great music at us, of all kinds, in generous handfuls. You barely have time to
catch your breath after a concert and take a walk in the wind-swept reed-beds around Snape
Maltings Concert Hall, before the next thrilling event comes along.

Yesterday there were a mere two concerts, but they were both astonishingly rich. The first came
from the Paris-based Ensemble Diderot, which offered a feast of those French mid-18 century
th
composers who married Italian sprightliness with French suavité and grace. In a less idiomatic
performance one’s ear might have tired of the constantly drooping phrases and the twittering
ornamental notes clustered around the melody like pearls. But these players knew just how to
temper these very French things with the rhythmic fire and bite of the Italian style. The slow
movement of Boismortier’s Cello Concerto, where the two violins of Johannes Prahmsoler and