The 60^th Aldeburgh Summer Festival:  8^th to 24^th June, 2007  (AO)

“Why not, said Peter Pears, make our own Festival ? a modest Festival with a few concerts given by friends ? Why not have an Aldeburgh Festival”

 
It’s hard to imagine that “only” 60 years have passed since Benjamin Britten and Peter Pears set up home in the Aldeburgh area, and created the Aldeburgh Festival.  It’s now an important feature of the cultural life of this nation. Although Britten’s own music always features, the Festival has continually nurtured new composers and musicians.  Shostakovich and Henze were very closely associated with Britten and Aldeburgh. More recently, the festival has helped Thomas Adès, Oliver Knussen, Colin Matthews and Simon Bainbridge, among others. The platform at the Maltings has seen many great artists in its time, including Mstislav Rostropovich, who passed away so recently.  No wonder it has become a place of pilgrimage, even though Britten wasn’t the kind of man to encourage Wagnerian-style reverence.

The Festival is also unique because it takes place in Suffolk, in a landscape which inspired Britten's musical personality quite profoundly.  Despite his importance, Britten was in many ways outside the heartland of British musical life:  he didn’t participate in circles frequented by Ralph Vaughan Williams, Finzi and other contemporaries.  The wild Suffolk coast was more his landscape, physically and artistically, than the Cotswolds or the “Heart of England”, so beloved of Elgar.  Simply being in the Aldeburgh environment helps you intuit the background to Britten’s acerbic inner world.  You simply have to see the view from Crag House, overlooking the beach, to imagine what Britten looked out on.  Walking in the reeds at Snape at night, with only stars for light, you connect somehow to an ancient time before urban life transformed the countryside:  in the villages, you can almost visualise Peter Grimes and Albert Herring.  The Chelsea 4x4 crowd hasn’t completely invaded this part of the country yet.

Yet Aldeburgh has always had a progressive, European ethos.  Britten learned much from European composers, and the Festival has always attracted international support.  So it is, then, that this year’s Festival celebrates Italy, its music and its wider influence.  The starting point is Death in Venice.  Thomas Mann’s novella Death in Venice was only very loosely based on Mahler, who had died the year before Mann wrote it but  the book's themes must have had powerful resonance for Britten, nearing the end of his own life.  For me, it’s the most personal and emotionally poignant of all of Britten’s operas.  All his life, he was fascinated by youth and purity, decay and corruption, ambiguity and sacrifice. This was a plot which meant a lot.  Even the Mahler connection had significance, as Britten had discovered Mahler in his youth, driving his friends to distraction by playing creaky old recordings over and over.

This year's Festival therefore opens with a completely new production of Britten’s Death in Venice, featuring Alan Oke as Aschenbach, Peter Sidhom as the Traveller and William Towers as the Voice of Apollo.   The production is directed by Yoshi Oida, who, apparently has some quite radical ideas in mind.   For this reason alone, it will be unmissable.   In typically thorough Aldeburgh tradition, the production will be augmented by a screening of the film by Luchino Visconti, and by a Symposium on the work in which the speakers will include Oida, Richard Stokes and Colin Matthews.

The Italian theme that runs powerfully throughout the entire festival will be developed by two major Monteverdi concerts, one featuring Il Sesto Libro de Madrigali on 16^th June and another featuring the Vespers, on 19^th June.  Both will, of course, be performed on period instruments.  While Monteverdi marks the birth of opera, in England the Masque form was being developed and to complement the concerts featuring Monteverdi and Gesualdo, there will be others featuring Purcell, Byrd and music from the courts of Kings James and Charles.  Beyond the Italian / English connection, Bach’s Mass in B minor will be conducted by Masaaki Suzuki, who will also give a special recital on one of the few organs to survive Cromwell’s armies.  There’ll also be the UK Premiere of Stravinsky’s arrangement of Bach’s Preludes and Fugues, conducted by Thomas Adès.  Returning to the the Italian themes music by Luigi Nono and his mentor Luigi Dallapiccola will also feature, and there will be works from Paganini, Palestrina, Berio, Sciarrino, Respighi and Scarlatti.

Music by Thomas Adès will also figure prominently, incorporated into intelligently planned programmes.  For example his Studies from Couperin will be played beside Ravel’s Le tombeau de Couperin, and his Darknesse Visible with Dowland, Purcell and Britten sonnets.  There’s more Adès, too, and a welcome programme on 15^th featuring Oliver Knussen’s new Songs for Sue and a song cycle by Luke Bedford, Or voit tout en aventure, which I think is one of the most inventive -  and singable -  works by a younger composer in recent years.

As Peter Pears said, this is a festival where concerts are often given “by friends”.  The much loved Alfred Brendel plays the important Saturday evening recital at the beginning of the schedule, on 9^th June, in a sumptuous programme of Beethoven, Schubert, Haydn and Mozart.  Some of Aldeburgh’s other “friends” also include Irvine Arditti, Thomas Zehetmair and the Northern Sinfonia, Louis Lortie, Simon Keenlyside, and the Britten Sinfonia.

And, as part of the Aldeburgh philosophy is the encouragement of young talent, regulars include the Britten-Pears Alumni and the Hesse students.  Another important part of the ethos, too, is community involvement, for this is no “ivory tower”.  Walks through the area, installations and music-making events on the beach are all part of the heady mix that is this most enjoyable fortnight. 

 

Anne Ozorio

Festival web site: www.aldeburgh.co.uk