Page 102 - Aldeburgh Festival 2022 FINAL COVERAGE BOOK

JOHN ANGERSON FOR THE TIMES

Wigglesworth too has a big new challenge ahead. His conducting has always been as important

to him as his composition. (You can see him in action on Sky Arts on June 21, when he

conducts A London Dream, a danced version of Mendelssohn’s A Midsummer Night’s

Dream filmed on the streets of the capital.) From September, however, it will occupy a large

proportion of his working hours, when he takes up his new post as chief conductor of the BBC
Scottish Symphony Orchestra.

“Planning what to do in my first season, I felt like a kid in a toy shop,” he says. “I think we are

being pretty adventurous. For instance we have programmed a big chunk of Messiaen’s

opera Saint-François d’Assise, and that doesn’t get played every night of the week.”

There’s more Messiaen in the concert that launches the Glasgow season on September 22. It’s

the song-cycle Poèmes pour Mi, with one Sophie Bevan as soloist. “It’s rather sweet,” Bevan

says, “because Messiaen wrote the work as a gift for his wife, and we are performing it on our

wedding anniversary.”

The Yorkshire-born Wigglesworth is an only child from a small family of non-musicians.

Bevan, by contrast, comes from an enormous family who all sing and play instruments, quite a

few of them professionally. She is the eldest of eight siblings and her organist father had 13

brothers and sisters.

“When the whole family gets together, it’s like an indoor fireworks party,” Wigglesworth says.

“They are all such strong personalities, and there’s that thing of having to shout loudest to be

heard. I just sit there, silent and unnoticed.”

“Actually, you usually escape outside with a large glass of wine, and smoke a pipe,” Bevan

says.

Sixteen Bevan cousins and siblings have just recorded their first family album (out on Signum

next year), conducted by Graham Ross. “We needed someone from outside the family to tell us
all to shut up,” Bevan says. It’s of motets by Palestrina, Victoria, Byrd and others from the

golden age of Catholic polyphony — music they all grew up singing in church.