Page 541 - Media Coverage Book - 75th Aldeburgh Festival 2024

Scored for an orchestra suitable for the two Mozart works sharing the Knussen Chamber

Orchestra’s programme, the 15-minute piece nonetheless took a rather modest approach. It

followed the example of the Eise Eisinga Planetarium, the 18th-century orrery built into a

humble Netherlands sitting room ceiling. I found Weir’s work an excellent and
individual creation, recognisably English in its quasi-conservative musical lineage, but radiant

with a sense of wonder — driven along by textural and harmonic niceties ranging from

exhilarating ascending scales and colliding sound blocks to the unnerving sounds of two

thrusting double basses poking holes in a timpani tattoo.

Guided by the composer/conductor/pianist Ryan Wigglesworth, the orchestra’s mix of Royal

Academy of Music students and professionals was in particularly fine fettle here. Quality dipped

a bit in Mozart’s Jupiter Symphony and Piano Concerto No 24, where their enthusiastic attack

tended to smudge some of the clarity this music needs. The wind section, however, shone

regardless.

The concerto’s slightly po-faced soloist, Wigglesworth provided other diversions from the usual

course by prefacing his performance with his own festival commission, Glasmelodien. The

eight-minute piano piece musing on Mozart’s little adagio movement, K356, was written for that

eerie late-18th-century phenomenon, the glass harmonica. Sitting at the keys, Wigglesworth
conjured disconcerting harmonies from every octave his piano offered: an achievement luckily

avoided during his darkly coloured cadenza in the concerto’s first movement, though it did

extend Mozart’s stylistic range by at least 120 years.

Ensemble Diderot’s delightful afternoon concert at Snape Maltings shrank the musical forces to

just four: two violins, one cello and a harpsichord so prettily coloured that a knot of fans
gathered round in the interval to inspect it and admire. The leader Johannes Pramsohler’s

enthusiasm for his 18th-century French trio sonatas and whatnots was most infectious.

Highlights included the hurtling finale of the sample sonata by Jean-Marie Leclair and a

rollicking chaconne from Louis-Gabriel Guillemain — a wild card with an unhappy end: death

by 14 stab wounds, supposedly self-administered.
★★★★☆