Page 159 - Aldeburgh Festival 2022 FINAL COVERAGE BOOK

Anna Dennis/ Image, The Other Richard courtesy Britten Pears Arts

I became very excited about writing an opera – one of the main reasons for this was that I knew
it would be interesting to be working with so many extra elements. I’m usually curating a
listeners’ time and filling it with as many wonderous things as I can and, when you’re working on
an opera, you have much longer to do this. You have words that you may find exciting, and
which leads you to compose the music in a different way. Scenes have shapes, characters have
motivations, and they have reasons for what their character is feeling, and this influences how
they might be singing.

All these extra things are helpful and provocative in the composition process. When you write an
orchestral piece, you’re collaborating with the conductor and musicians but the new
collaborations that come into play when you’re writing an opera took me to a new space.
There’s loads of artistry of the other people involved in the production – such as the artistry of a
director and, of course, the set, costume, lighting, and sound designers, and this is a wonderful
new experience.

I’ve been enjoying the rehearsal process very much. The cast – Anna Dennis (Violet), Richard
Burkhard (Felix), Frances Gregory (Laura) and Andrew MacKenzie-Wicks (The Clockkeeper) and
are fantastic. The Conductor, Andrew Gourlay is phenomenal – he knows the score inside out;
and seeing Violet’s Director, Jude Christian, bringing her intelligence and emotional literacy to
the room and how she’s working this through with such clarity is amazing to watch.

Because of the delays due to Covid, it’s been a long time since we finished writing Violet – it was
originally meant to premiere in 2020 – so it’s going to be an amazing thing to see it coming to life
on the stage at last.