Page 491 - Aldeburgh Festival 2022 FINAL COVERAGE BOOK

Colin’s Column

17 June 2022

Aldeburgh Festival 2022 – Martyn Brabbins conducts BBC National Orchestra of
Wales in Grace Williams’s Sea Sketches & Britten’s Suite on English Folk Tunes – ‘A
Time There Was…’, and the premiere of Gavin Higgins’s The Faerie Bride/Marta
Fontanals-Simmons & Roderick Williams [live BBC Radio 3 broadcast].

Gavin Higgins

Friday, June 17, 2022
Snape Maltings Concert Hall, Snape, Suffolk

For their second appearance at this year’s Aldeburgh Festival, Martyn Brabbins and
BBCNOW followed http://www.colinscolumn.com/aldeburgh-festival-2022-martyn-brabbins-
conducts-bbc-national-orchestra-of-wales-in-maconchys-proud-thames-shostakovich-ten-
laura-van-der-heijden-plays-waltons-cello-concerto-live-bbc-radio/ with another absorbing
concert, beginning with Grace Williams’s Sea Sketches (1944, London; she was Welsh). Scored
for strings, it’s a finely crafted piece, immediately engaging and descriptive, perhaps owing
to Arthur Bliss’s Music for Strings (1935, which Boult had premiered at the Salzburg Festival
with the Vienna Philharmonic), Williams using the chosen instruments with imagination to
capture the sea both restless and lyrical, the mysteries of the deep, in rapid force, and
ultimately at peace. The NOW strings were splendidly unanimous, colourful and expressive.
Also in five concise movements, one of Benjamin Britten’s ‘late’ works, his Opus 90, Suite on
English Folk Tunes (1974), nostalgically subtitled, which Leonard Bernstein soon took into his
repertoire and recorded with the New York Philharmonic. Britten uses his chamber
orchestra with plenty of variety, whether propulsive drums, beguiling harp, violins with their