Page 542 - Aldeburgh Festival 2022 FINAL COVERAGE BOOK

Cellist Anssi Karttunen, right, with Tamsin Waley-Cohen, Christopher Glynn and Claire Booth at
Aldeburgh’s Oliver Knussen day. Photograph: Britten Pears Arts

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The highlight was Knussen’s own Cleveland Pictures for large orchestra (2003-9). He
was a perfectionist; completion proved elusive. This work was unfinished, but
sufficiently intact for a world premiere performance by the BBC Symphony Orchestra,
conducted by Ryan Wigglesworth. Each of the seven movements is a response to a work
in the Cleveland Museum of Art, opening with Rodin and closing with Turner’s The
Burning of the Houses of Parliament, this last ending midair – and incomplete – with an
impetuous whip-crack and rattle of maracas. Heard alongside Knussen’s Horn Concerto
(1994), with the BBCSO’s principal horn, Martin Owen, as excellent soloist, Cleveland
Pictures hinted at an expansive new sound world for a composer usually celebrated for
the intimacy of his music. (The BBCSO’s account of Mussorgsky’s Pictures at an
Exhibition – in the glittering version by Ravel, a composer adored by Knussen – was one
to remember: mighty, ferocious and virtuosic. The finale, usually called in English The
Great Gate of Kyiv, had sombre magnificence. Listen on BBC Sounds.)

As a climax of its bicentenary celebrations, the Royal Academy of Music Symphony
Orchestra, with the RAM women’s chorus and Tiffin Boys’ choir, as well as
alumna Stephanie Wake-Edwards as mezzo-soprano soloist, squeezed on to the Festival
Hall stage for Mahler’s Symphony No 3 in D minor. As epics go (this has been quite
some week), at 110 minutes long, with outsized orchestra and embracing all aspects of
heaven and earth, it is up there at the top.