Page 25 - Coverage Book Festival of New BPA

1 March 2021
R E V I E W
Festival of New, Britten Pears Arts, review, plus

the best of February’s classical & opera

This showcase of work-in-progress had too much verbiage and not enough music
By Ivan Hewett, CLASSICAL MUSIC CRITIC

Letty Stott (far left) at Britten Pears Arts' Festival of New CREDIT: Beki Smith/Britten Pears Arts

Britten Pears Arts is best-known to the public for the annual Aldeburgh Festival, but it’s also one of
the most generous patrons in the land. Every year it offers residencies to groups of artists and
musicians who are burning to create a work of art together, and need space and time to work on it.

At Britten Pears Arts they get to do it in the beautiful surroundings of Snape Maltings, Suffolk,
where old industrial buildings have been turned into rehearsal and production studios.

It’s an extraordinarily enlightened scheme, open to artists from all round the world, and in the
“Festival of New” shown on the company’s YouTube channel on Saturday we were offered a
glimpse into 12 projects, seven of which were actually completed on site.

We saw the sound artist Vahakn Matossian roaming around the countryside in search of
interesting sounds; we heard replicas of ancient brass instruments being played by Letty Scott
outside the Maltings concert hall; we saw Dom Bouffard’s electric guitars being dragged across the