Page 611 - Media Coverage Book - 75th Aldeburgh Festival 2024

1960s sort of way). And Curlew River has the added resonance of being

based on a Japanese Noh play whose slow-moving intensity had impressed
Britten when he first encountered it on a trip to Asia.

The story tells of a woman searching for her lost son and driven mad by
despair until, ferried across a river, she finds his tomb and is granted a
consoling vision of the boy. Britten translates the action from Japan to
Suffolk and from Buddhist myth into a Christian parable of grace –

resulting in a work of haunting beauty, the more powerful for the ritualised
restraint of the performance style.

Performed in the magnificent medieval church at Blythburgh, on a wooden
catwalk running the entire length of the nave from font to chancel, it played

out amidst the audience with a confronting closeness.

And though Deborah Warner’s staging tried to secularise things (there
wasn’t too much sense of a community of monks making the show), the text
was undeniable. As was the agonised intensity of Ian Bostridge as the

madwoman (the Curlew cast is all-male), sending shivers down the spine as
he collapsed before the spirit of the boy to take a blessing from his own
child’s outstretched hand.

With a comparably striking performance from Duncan Rock as the

Ferryman, luxury casting of Willard White in the modest role of the Abbott,
and deft handling of Britten’s score by a choice instrumental and vocal
ensemble under Audrey Hyland, it was surely this year’s Aldeburgh
highlight. Which is saying something when you consider that the season
included a landmark staging of Judith Weir’s confoundingly enigmatic

opera Blond Eckbert, a dazzling account of music from Britten’s rarely danced
ballet Prince of the Pagodas by the LPO, a residency by the intriguingly

unconventional young violinist Daniel Pioro…and so much else.

In times when serious music is struggling, thanks to the multiple whammies
of Brexit, Covid, inflation and political indifference, Aldeburgh stands out
like a beacon of resilience. It’s a national treasure. And that its retiring
Chief Executive Roger Wright has just been given a knighthood in the
King’s birthday honours tells you as much.