Page 556 - Media Coverage Book - 75th Aldeburgh Festival 2024

For its 75th birthday celebrations, the Aldeburgh Festival
recreates the festival's very opening concert from 1948,

with one modern twist

The first concert of the Aldeburgh Festival took place in Aldeburgh parish church
dedicated to SS Peter and Paul on 15 June 1948 featuring an attractive programme
comprising Purcell’s Chaconny in G minor and Handel’s Organ Concerto in D minor paired
with Martin Shaw’s God’s Grandeur and Britten’s cantata, Saint Nicolas. For this
significant 75th festival, the concert was recreated on 15 June 2024 at Snape
Maltings with Shaw’s work replaced by Robin Haigh’s LUCK, a concerto for trumpet and
orchestra written for Matilda Lloyd. [Read Robin's article about writing the work]

Appropriately, the opening work of the first concert of the Aldeburgh Festival in 1948 fell
to the well-loved 17th-century English-born composer, Henry Purcell, one of Benjamin
Britten’s major musical influences. Therefore, in Purcell’s Chaconny in G minor - a short,
sharp, five-minute piece - it provided a nice curtain-raiser to an agreeable and
entertaining concert (I should imagine, one of the hottest tickets of the festival)
immaculately, crisply and evenly played by the strings of the Britten Sinfonia conducted
with great flair and enthusiasm by Australian-British conductor, Jessica Cottis, currently
artistic director and chief conductor of the Canberra Symphony Orchestra. The piece was
probably composed around 1680 while Purcell was employed by King Charles II and
nearly a decade before the composer turned his attention almost exclusively to the
theatre after the accession of William III and Queen Mary in 1689.

Handel: Organ Concerto - Katherine Dienes-Williams, Britten Sinfonia, Jessica Cottis - Aldeburgh Festival at Snape Maltings, 2024 (Photo: Angus Cooke)