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Wednesday 12 December 2018

Looking Ahead: Aldeburgh 2019 - Thomas Larcher, Mark Padmore, Barbara Hannigan

Thomas Larcher (© Richard Haughton)
Thomas Larcher (© Richard Haughton)
The composer Thomas Larcher will be one of three Artists in Residence at the 2019  Aldeburgh Festival, which will run from 7 to 23 June 2019. The other two Artists in Residence will be tenor Mark Padmore, and soprano and conductor Barbara Hannigan.

Larcher's first opera, The Hunting Gun, which premiered to great acclaim at the Bregenz Festival in 2018, will receive its UK premiere at the 2019 Aldeburgh Festival conducted by Ryan Wigglesworth with a cast including Sam Boden as Dichter (Narrator). Also as part of the residency, a number of Larcher's other works will be performed across the festival, inclulding his four string quartets by the Albion Quartet, the Ardeo Quartet, the Heath Quartet and Quatuor Diotima, and pianist Paul Lewis will give the premiere of Larcher's festival commission.

As part of Mark Padmore's residency he wants audiences to think more closely about the words set in songs and in opera, so there are four Poetry and Music events where writer, broadcaster and performer Dr Kate Kennedy is joined by leading poets to discuss the texts set by Britten in his song cycles Winter Words (Thomas Hardy), The Holy Sonnets of John Donne, Songs and Proverbs of William Blake, and Who are These Children? (William Soutar). The discussions are followed by performances from Padmore, Roderick Williams and pianist Andrew West.

These two residencies intersect when Mark Padmore performs Thomas Larcher's A Padmore Cycle accompanied by the composer. Larcher wrote the cycle for Mark Padmore in 2011 [see my review of Padmore and Larcher's CD recording of the cycle]

Padmore will be joined by Roderick Williams for a recital which re-creates the 1828 concert of Schubert's music, the only known all-Schubert programme performed in a public concert during the composer's lifetime.

Barbara Hannigan's residency is part of the Aldeburgh Festival's collaboration with Ojai Festival in California where Hannigan is 2019 Festival Music Director. At Aldeburgh, Hannigan will curate concerts in the final four days, and will be singing the role of Anne Trulove in Stravinsky's The Rake's Progress.

Full details from the Aldeburgh Festival website.

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