Page 551 - Aldeburgh Festival 2022 FINAL COVERAGE BOOK

clear, and you can’t help but feel that Coult and his librettist Alice Birch set
out with no fixed plan for how their narrative would finish, then got stuck.

That said, Violet grasps a core truth about opera: that good narratives don’t

tell you everything but leave space for the music to fill in, working a magic
of its own. Coult’s score is magical from start to finish, written in a way that
conjures up rich, vivid soundscapes with impressive skill. I can’t remember
when I last heard a more striking first attempt at opera. And it had a good

team in director Jude Christian, Anna Dennis singing the title role, and the
London Sinfonietta conducted by Andrew Gourlay delivering fantastic work
all round. But then at Aldeburgh, that’s what you expect.

Founded by Benjamin Britten who remains its presiding spirit, there’s no
finer festival in Britain. And this year’s opening weekend set the tone for

2022, with the outstanding clarinettist/composer Mark Simpson in
residence; Dame Janet Baker turning up to talk about her own life as the
queen of English mezzos; and an exhibition about the women in Britten’s
world – homing in on artists like the great Dame as well as the late soprano

Jennifer Vyvyan which, as Vyvyan’s biographer, I was delighted to see. Her
significance in creating major operatic roles for Britten and other composers
gets forgotten these days, but it was important at the time. Worth
celebrating now.

Someone of indisputable significance these days is the baritone Roderick

Williams who turns up all over the place – not just as a singer but as a
composer too. And it was in both capacities that he surfaced in the depths
of rural Sussex for a concert in the Shipley Arts Festival that had him
performing songs by John Ireland (who once lived nearby), and introducing

the premiere of his own, newly completed Piano Trio. Written for the
Stradivarius Trio, who played it here, it was a relative rarity for Williams
who tends to write music for voices, setting a text. So it was perhaps an
indication of straying beyond his com-fort zone that this wordless piano trio

made reference in one movement to a folk song, and in another to John Ire-
land’s famous hymn-tune for “My Song is Love Unknown” (which emerged
blazing out of the abstract instrumental writing, half-disguised with jazz
harmonies). The temptation to sing along was considerable in my corner of

the audience which clearly contained church-goers. And though we didn’t, a
point was made: embed a celebrated hymn-tune in a new work and you give
your listeners an aural anchorage. Something to fix on. There’s a risk of