Page 581 - Media Coverage Book - 75th Aldeburgh Festival 2024

His face convulsed with grief, his vocal delivery sometimes scrambled like the Madwoman’s

mind, elsewhere seemingly powered by pure anguish, he was the focal point of Deborah

Warner’s spare but telling production, often delivering his lines from a wooden jetty stretching

right through the audience. That, too, was where the work’s controversial climax was played
out, where Britten departs from the bleak ending of his source material, a Japanese Noh play,

and instead provides a miraculous moment of rebirth and absolution as the dead child reappears.

Britten transferred the story to an East Anglian ferry crossing, and Warner beautifully evoked

that too, without upstaging the silvery light and sublime carved angels of Blythburgh Church.
And a brilliant cast — with Duncan Rock as an initially sceptical Ferryman, Marcus Farnsworth

as the Madwoman’s startled fellow traveller and Willard White as the Abbot — were

complemented by a superbly robust male chorus and seven impeccable instrumentalists under

Audrey Hyland’s direction.

Britten creates such a liminal sound world here, recognisably linked to plainsong yet with the

instruments, partially unhinged from each other, evoking a more ethereal realm. It was perfectly

realised here. No further performances, but BBC TV cameras were there to film the production
for future broadcast.

Follow that! Well, some did, rushing back to Snape Maltings for a late-night performance of
Schoenberg’s Pierrot Lunaire. That, too, was admirably done with seven fine instrumentalists

(the Nash Ensemble), investing Schoenberg’s 21 movements with irony, nostalgia and even

terror, and Claire Booth not just singing, speaking, purring, growling and hurling out the surreal

texts but embodying their mercurial moods like a virtuoso mime. No cameras here, sadly, but

Booth’s recording of Pierrot is out in September — part of what’s virtually a one-woman
campaign to celebrate Schoenberg’s 150th birthday.

Follow @timesculture to read the latest reviews