Page 511 - Aldeburgh Festival 2022 FINAL COVERAGE BOOK

Bold but also brilliant. Higgins’s 40-minute piece is superbly atmospheric, whether evoking a

murky lake, the ecstatic dawning of love, a folk wedding or a village tragedy. It’s also a very

moving parable, touching on cultural incomprehensions and closed minds that are as prevalent

today as in the primordial mists of Welsh myth.

The particular myth retold by Higgins and his librettist, Francesca Simon, is that of the Lady of

Llyn y Fan Fach. She is a fairy who is lured from her lake by her future husband. She supplies
him with cattle, sheep and sons, but warns him that she will return to the lake if he upsets her

three times. Of course he does exactly that, by failing to take her side when the villagers react

against her strange fairy ways.

Two excellent soloists — Marta Fontanals-Simmons and Roderick Williams — take the parts
not just of the fairy and her husband but also (singing in strident octaves) the indignant villagers.

However, it is the orchestra that turns this whimsical story into something profound and even

epic.

Higgins opens with a very dark, primordial stew of bass instruments, but that suddenly gives

way to explosive flecks of sound, shimmering textures, folk fiddle tunes and, towards the end, a

consoling lullaby that seems to draw on centuries of Welsh song. Cleverly, too, the voices seem

to leave a trail behind them in the orchestral writing, though whether the vocal contours have
grown organically from the instrumental writing or vice versa is impossible to say.

All this was played with admirable flair by the BBC National Orchestra of Wales under Martyn
Brabbins’s clear direction. And the preceding works were well chosen to complement the

premiere. Grace Williams’s 1944 Sea Sketches are just as atmospheric, Welsh and watery as

Higgins’s new work, though much more romantic in language, while Britten’s suite of English

folk tunes, A Time There Was, also serves up ancestral melodies with an undertow of menace

and sadness.

Available on BBC Sounds

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