Page 467 - Aldeburgh Festival 2022 FINAL COVERAGE BOOK

8 June 2022

The Aldeburgh Festival in the east of England offers original art on climate change, new concert
formats such as the interactive song recital and the re-encounter with vocal greats such as Ann
Murray and Janet Baker.

climate change has also arrived at the traditional Aldeburgh Festival on the eastern English North Sea
coast, County Suffolk. In the opening days of the festival, which has now picked up speed again after a
two-year pandemic break, it was the topic twice. With varying degrees of success. The chamber opera
"Violet" by Tom Coult, born in 1988, currently a shooting star of the London music scene, avoids
pointing finger wisdom and instead brings a haunted story of British design to the stage. Alice Burch's
clever libretto paints a picture of an average couple and a village community experiencing the race
against climate change as treacherous theft of time. On the tower clock, the hand mysteriously jumps
forward at night, first by an hour, then at two and so on, until after twenty-four days there is no more
time.

The countdown is displayed on a guillotine that has been discreetly pushed into semi-darkness, the
digital cloudy sky in the background turns sulphurous yellow and fiery red and sometimes mutates
into a playground for virus populations. In the village, social life gets out of joint; and the two main
characters of the four-person play, Violet and her husband Felix, undergo a subtle shift in
consciousness. He, thinking rationally but blind to what is happening, reacts increasingly helplessly
and aggressively. She intuitively grasps the intangible new, wants to get out of the patriarchal confines