Friday 28 February 2014

Aldeburgh Festival - 13 to 29 June 2014

Maggi Hambling The Scallop (2003) Aldeburgh beach.Photograph © Andrew Dunn
Maggi Hambling The Scallop (2003) Aldeburgh beach
Photograph © Andrew Dunn
Follow that! Artistic director Pierre-Laurent Aimard must have had something of a tough time preparing the 2014 Aldeburgh Festival. How do you follow the composer's centenary celebrations which included events like Peter Grimes on the Beach. But follow it Aimard has and the 2014 festival is not without interest with staged performances of Owen Wingrave plus an Aldeburgh version of Cage's Musicircus, a day devoted to the music of Tristan Murail, the Monteverdi Choir at 50 and of course the alumni of the 2013 Britten-Pears Young Artists Programme and Young Composers Programmes.

Mark Wigglesworth conducts and Neil Bartlett directs a new production of Owen Wingrave using David Matthews reduction for chamber orchestra. The cast includes the young baritone Ross Ramgobin in the title role, plus Susan Bullock as Miss Wingrave, Janis Kelly as Mrs Julian, Richard Berkeley-Steele as General Sir Philip Wingrave and Jonathan Summers as Spencer Coyle (performances from 13 June at Snape Maltings).  The is also an Owen Wingrave study day (17 June), plus a showing of the original BBC film of the opera (16 June). An exhibition at The Red House, The pity of war: Britten's pacifism also links to themes from the opera. Another film being shown is Derek Jarman's visual counterpoint to Britten's War Requiem (19 June), along with a 1964 BBC TV film of the work (26 June).


22 June features an Aldeburgh Musicircus, an emulation of one of Cage's Musicircus events. All over Aldeburgh ensembles, soloists, local folk musicians, brass bands and pop musicians will be playing in expected and unexpected places, all culminating in a mass picnic on the beach. There is also an exhibition John Cage's Musicircus: The Genesis of an Idea looking at the origins of the concept (14 - 29 June).

Daisy Evans and Silent Opera are presenting a trio of short operatic installations, Live | Revive | Lament with three different performers from three different vocal disciplines (opera, improvisation and contemporary song) each interpreting the music of Monteverdi combining live music with electronic and pre-recorded, all at different locations around Snape Maltings. (16 June)

Tristan Murail
Tristan Murail
Saturday 28 June is devoted to the music of Tristan Murail with concerts by Klangforum Wien and the BBC Symphony Orchestra, conductor Sakari Oramo, with Pierre-Laurent Aimard taking the solo part in Murail's Piano Concerto: Le Desenchantement du Monde.

Exaudi, director James Weeks, are pairing Antoine Brumel's amazing 12-part Et ecce terrae motus or Earthquake Mass with music by Russell Haswell. As Brumel's score is now incomplete (the manuscript has rotted away), Haswell has created  new work which completes the Brumel (14 June). Mark Padmore and Pamela Helen Stephen are giving a lieder recital with Ryan Wigglesworth at the piano in which they perform Schumann's Liederkreis, Janacek's Diary of One Who Disappeared and the premiere of Ryan Wigglesworth's  Echo and Narcissus, setting Ted Hughes poem. Christopher Maltman and Malcolm Martineau perform Britten's Songs and Proverbs plus songs by Debussy and Duparc (19 June). Ian Bostridge and Thomas Ades are performing Schubert's Die Winterreise (22 June).

The Monteverdi Choir (celebrating their 50th birthday this year), the English Baroque Soloists and John Eliot Gardiner perform Scarlatti's Stabat Mater, Rameau's motet In Convertendo and Handel's Dixit Dominus (20 June)



The Britten-Pears Ensemble conducted by Gregory Charette will be performing Maderna's Serenata 2, Carter's ASKO Concerto plus premieres by Louis Chiappetta, Tom Coult, Nicholas Moroz, Michael Taplin, Robert Peate and Emma-Ruth Richards, all pieces developed last summer on a course led by Oliver Knussen, Colin Matthews and Michael Gandolfi (21 June). And alumni from the 2013 Britten-Pears Young Artists Programme, Magid el-Bushra (counter tenor), Ian Watt (guitar/lute), Lea Trommenschlager (soprano) and Aska Carmen Saito (piano), perform music by Dowland, Britten, John McLeod, and Schumannwww.johnmcleod.uk.com (27 June). Thomas Ades (himself a product of the Britten-Pears young composers scheme) conducts the CBSO in his own Tevot, Gerald Barry's Piano Concerto  (with Nicolas Hodges) and music by Ravel and the young Spanish composer Francisco Coll-Garcia (21 June).

Accordionist Teodoro Anzellotti makes his Aldeburgh Festival debut in an intriguing programme of music by Liget, Kurtag, Liszt, Janacek, Domenico Scarlatti and Rebecca Saunders, plus Luciano Berio's Sequenza XII which Berio wrote for him (20 June).

Full information and book from the Aldeburgh Festival website.

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