Page 133 - Aldeburgh Festival 2022 FINAL COVERAGE BOOK

Hilary Campbell and Britten Pears Young Artist, Omri Kochavi. His work sets texts by Iraqi-born Israeli
poet, Amira Hess, inspired by women in both ancient and modern Jewish-Babylonian culture he
describes as the ‘Ghostbustresses’ - warding off evil spirits through poetry and art.

And in celebration of the Glasgow-born composer and conductor, Oliver Knussen, who was at the
heart of the Aldeburgh Festival for many decades, would have turned 70 this month. Therefore, in
remembering Ollie, the festival will be hosting three concerts over the course of one single day (Friday
24th June) in his honour. All the performers taking part have connections to Knussen as a composer
and conductor and the trio of concerts offers an introduction to his world and an upbeat to a concert
by the BBC Symphony Orchestra, conducted by Ryan Wigglesworth, comprising three pieces inspired
by pictures and objects at art exhibitions by Mussorgsky, Respighi and, indeed, Knussen, whose
unfinished work Cleveland Pictures will receive its first performance. From Rodin and Fabergé to
Goya and Turner, each movement of Cleveland Pictures brilliantly translates a different item from the
collection of the Cleveland Museum of Art, Ohio, into sound. Even in its incomplete form (15½
minutes) the work ranks as one of Knussen’s most extensive orchestral statements. Of seven
projected movements, four exist complete, two exist as fully orchestrated fragments and one exists
only as a ten-bar sketch in short score.
The American première is currently being planned by the Cleveland Orchestra who originally
commissioned the work. Graciously, the orchestra’s management has given its permission for this first
performance to go ahead at this year’s Aldeburgh Festival. To end the tribute to Knussen, Martin
Owen joins the BBC Symphony as soloist in the composer’s Horn Concerto written in
August/September 1994. The work was premièred by Barry Tuckwell in Suntory Hall, Tokyo, on 7th
October 1994, with the Tokyo Metropolitan Symphony Orchestra under the direction of the composer.
The score was revised a year later.

Large musical forces descend upon the Suffolk coast for a two-day visit with the BBC National
Orchestra of Wales. They’ll give a couple of concerts conducted by Martyn Brabbins. The first
features Shostakovich’s tenth symphony coupled with Walton’s cello concerto performed by Laura
van der Heijden as well as a tribute to the river Thames by Elizabeth Maconchy. In the second, the
eagerly anticipated première of Gavin Higgins’ new cantata, The Faerie Bride, promises a festival
highlight. The work (featuring mezzo-soprano Marta Fontanals-Simmons and baritone Roderick
Williams) dramatizes a Welsh ‘lady of the lake’ myth in which the faerie who emerges from the water
to become a local man’s bride is rejected by the local community but takes matters into her own
hands. The concert opens with Grace Williams’ Sea Sketches for strings. A piece dating from 1944,
the work powerfully evokes the sea in all its glory.

The Britten Sinfonia also holds fort at Snape Maltings Concert Hall for a couple of concerts, too, with
their first offering an inspirational new concerto for orchestra featuring an array of percussion
instruments collected from hundreds of pieces of rubbish thereby creating an incredible array of
perfectly tuned and untuned percussion instruments offering a greater range of sounds and timbres
than a normal orchestra’s percussion section. Here they showcase the resulting concerto - an
inspirational project, the brainchild of percussionist Vivi Vassileva and composer-conductor Gregor A.
Mayrhofer - performed by the brilliant orchestral players of the Britten Sinfonia. For their second
concert, conducted by Gregor A. Mayrhofer, Beethoven’s Symphony no. 6 in F major (the
Pastoral) will be heard in stark contrast to a new work from Brett Dean in response to the Beethoven
while Vivi Vassileva will give the first UK performance of a new work by Bushra El-Turk, one of this
year’s featured composers.

From large musical forces to the intimate force of one, the acclaimed organist, Anna Lapwood, makes
her Aldeburgh Festival début playing her own arrangement of Britten's Four Sea Interludes in Snape
Maltings Concert Hall. Her programme will also include the ‘Prelude’ and ‘Angel’s Farewell’ from
Elgar’s The Dream of Gerontius, Kerensa Briggs’ Light in Darkness and Cheryl Frances-