Page 539 - Media Coverage Book - 75th Aldeburgh Festival 2024

Roldán Bernabé cooed amorously over the archingly melodic cello melody of Gulrim Choi,
provided the day’s most delicious moment.

The day’s second concert came from the Knussen Chamber Orchestra, made up of young players
from the Royal Academy of Music alongside seasoned professionals. This was less sensuously
alluring but had bigger expressive horizons. They were especially big in the case of Planet, an
orchestral response to photographic images of galaxies and Planet Earth from the Master of the
King’s Music Judith Weir, here being given its world premiere. There’s a stock musical response to
these images: portentous, awe-inspiring grandeur, tinged with outer-space coldness. But Weir
doesn’t do grand, portentous or cold. The three movements had a shining naivety, with bright
chords superimposed over wood-wind flourishes, tinged occasionally with dark mystery. We know
the heavenly bodies are vastly old, but in this delightful piece it seemed as if they are eternally
young.

Guiding the 40 or so young and not-so-young players from the podium was Ryan Wigglesworth, a
gifted musician who appeared as composer and pianist as well as conductor. He combined all three
roles in Mozart’s 24 Piano Concerto, which he directed from the piano with fierce energy in the
th
tragic minor-key moments, and pleasingly straightforward, flowing grace in the slow movement.
He also contributed a brand-new cadenza (solo spot) in the first movement, which took the fierce
melody and led it into regions of lonely, almost modernist harmonic cloudiness. It was more
effective than his new Mozart-inspired solo piano piece Glasmelodien, which ranged from
Messiaen-like cosmic vastness to the intimacies of Mozart’s famous piece for glass harmonica, but
didn’t quite succeed in marrying them.

Finally Wigglesworth led the orchestra in Mozart’s sublime Jupiter symphony. Most conductors
drive through the brusque opening gestures, but Wigglesworth stretched the pauses between them
by an infinitesimal amount. This had the paradoxical effect of heightening the grandeur and
humanising it at the same time. It was a shrewdly telling way to start, which the rest of the
wonderful performance more than lived up to.

The Aldeburgh Festival continues until June 23; brittenpearsarts.org