Page 42 - Aldeburgh Festival 2022 FINAL COVERAGE BOOK

17 December 2021

41 First performances, 11 first UK performances: 73rd Aldeburgh Festival in
June 2022

Oliver Knussen, whose 70th birthday is celebrated at the festival (Photo Mark Allan /BBC)
With the last two festivals cancelled and Tom Coult's new opera Violet (due to be
premiered in 2020) still lacking a first performance, the Aldeburgh Festival has
announced that the 2022 festival will run for an extra week, from 3 to 26 June 2022.
Other contemporary composers at the festival include Bushra El Turk, Gregor
Mayrhofer, Ryan Wigglesworth, Oliver Knussen, Mark Simpson, Gavin Higgins, Cheryl
Frances-Hoad, Owain Park, Dobrinka Tabakova, Aine Mallon, Judith Weir, Hilary
Campbell, Omri Kochavi, Laura Bowler, Liza Lim and the festival features 41 first
performances, 11 first UK performances and 19 Britten Pears Arts commissions - the
most significant representation of new music in the history of the Aldeburgh Festival.

Composer Tom Coult and librettist Alice Birch's new opera Violet (a first opera for both) will open the
festival. Developed at Snape Maltings as part of its Jerwood Opera Writing Programme, it features a
heroine, Violet, whose life of routine changes when time quickens, an hour is lost every day, long-held
certainties evaporate and ordered society falls into disarray. Andrew Gourlay conducts the London