A trio of concerts at this year’s Aldeburgh Festival highlights the diversity of music to be found on the Suffolk coast.

Edward Gardner & Royal Academy of Music Symphony Orchestra - Aldeburgh Festival (Photo: Britten Pears Arts)

Daniel Kidane: Sirens, Mark-Anthony Turnage: Refugee, Nielsen: Symphony No.4; Allan Clayton, Royal Academy of Music Symphony Orchestra, cond. Edward Gardner; Snape Maltings Concert Hall, Suffolk 

Alex Tay, Mingdu Li, Liucilė Vilimaitė, Hy-Khang Dang, Sam Rudd-Jones, Jasper Eaglesfield, Helen Grime, Mark-Anthony Turnage, Colin Matthews, Goehr, Saariaho; Britten Pears Contemporary Ensemble, cond. Jonathan Berman/Claudia Fuller; Britten Studio, Snape Maltings, Suffolk  

Purcell: King Arthur; Gabrieli Consort & Players, dir. Paul McCreesh; Snape Maltings Concert Hall, Suffolk  
Reviewed by Tony Cooper: 19-20 June 2025

The concert performance of Purcell’s King Arthur by the Gabrieli Consort and Players would take some beating. 

The opening concert of my first Aldeburgh Festival excursion this year featured a storming and high-energy work (faster than an F1 car!) entitled Sirens by Daniel Kidane, born to a Russian mother and an Eritrean father in 1986.  

For sure, an energetic and appealing composer, Kidane harbours bright and original ideas and I well remember (and favoured) his orchestral work Awake premièred by the BBC Symphony Orchestra, conducted by Sakari Oramo, when attending the Last Night of the Proms in 2019.  

A frenetic and tasteful opener to the Royal Academy of Music Symphony Orchestra’s concert in Snape Maltings as part of the 76th Aldeburgh Festival, Kidane’s Sirens, flamboyantly conducted by Edward Gardner, proved an atmospheric, eclectic and jazz-inspired piece capturing so well the sounds and energy of Manchester’s nightlife by incorporating elements of various musical genres from jungle to dubstep spiced up and mixed with an R&B cocktail for good measure. 

Helping so much the musical landscape and feel to the piece was Kidane employment of bowed crotales to create a sustained smooth ethereal sound harbouring rich overtones while the harmonies of the work become more intense and dissonant towards the final bars.  

Purcell: King Arthur - Gabrieli Consort & Players, Paul McCreesh - Aldeburgh Festival (Photo: Britten Pears Arts)

One of the four featured artists at this year’s festival, Kidane (a name to be reckoned with!) keeps good company with the likes of tenor Allan Clayton, composer Helen Grime and violinist Leila Josefowicz. 

As an aside, Sirens received its world première at Manchester’s Bridgewater Hall in 2016 performed by the BBC Philharmonic Orchestra under Andrew Gourlay. No stranger to the city, Kidane studied in Manchester at the Royal Northern College of Music. 

Closing the first half of the programme fell to Mark-Anthony Turnage’s 22-minute orchestral song-cycle Refugee dating from 2017/18 and first performed in September 2019 at Milton Court, Barbican, by Allan Clayton (the soloist on this occasion, too) with the Britten Sinfonia (the commissioning body) conducted by Andrew Gourlay.  

Comprising five movements, Refugee, quietly opens with a text by Emily Dickinson ‘These Strangers’ beautifully set to music by Turnage while the middle two sections featured Benjamin Zephaniah’s ‘We Refugees’ and WH Auden’s ‘Refugee Blues’ peppered with jazz-flavoured notation which Turnage so often incorporates in his compositions. The former mentioned nods to ‘gospel’ and the latter pays a tribute to the plight of Jewish migrants in New York City by recalling the gaudy cabaret world of Kurt Weill.  

However, it was Brian Bilston’s poem that I found the most harrowing and moving thus summing up the horror and plight of being a displaced person exemplified by these lines: ‘These haggard faces could belong to you and me’ / ‘Should life have dealt a different hand’ / ‘We need to see them for who they really are.’ The text, I feel, mirrors Wilfred Owens’ text in Britten’s War Requiem. 

I recall Dickinson’s ‘These Strangers’, too, in as much as my home city of Norwich is well-known for ‘Strangers’ as the city hosted floods of Huguenots (French Protestants) seeking refuge after facing persecution in France notably following the revocation of the Edict of Nantes in 1685.  

These so-called ‘Strangers’ played a significant role in Norwich's history through the valuable skills they brought with them especially appertaining to the weaving trade which greatly impacted on the city’s economy and culture. Even today Norwich has a professional/businessman’s club called ‘Strangers’ as well as a museum (Strangers’ Hall) forming part of the Norfolk Museums Service chronicling domestic life in Norfolk. 

The concert ended in a grand and imposing style with Carl Nielsen’s Symphony No.4, commonly known as ‘The Inextinguishable’, dating from 1916 and the most recorded of the composer’s six symphonies The name doesn’t really apply to the symphony itself but rather to ‘that which is inextinguishable’ referring to the elemental will to survive over the course of the First World War.  

One of the most dramatic and exuberant symphonies that Nielson wrote, the clashes of the first movement reappear in the final movement in which two sets of timpani battle it out from either side of the orchestra dramatically changing pitch while playing full throttle right to the end of a work that was thrilling to hear in the confines of the Snape Maltings Concert Hall. 

And without doubt, the youthful, spirited and well-drilled players of Royal Academy of Music Symphony Orchestra under the baton of Edward Gardner were enjoying every minute of it, playing magnificently to deliver an authoritative and accurate reading of this exceptional work offering the audience a fantastic and worthy ending to a memorable and well-planned concert highlighting in so many ways triumph over adversity. 

Britten Pears Contemporary Ensemble, Jonathan Berman - Aldeburgh Festival (Photo: Britten Pears Arts)

Time flies! It’s now 33 years since Colin Matthews and Olly Knussen founded the Aldeburgh Composition and Performance Course and well over a hundred composers have taken part. Thomas Adès and Julian Anderson took a bow in the first year while Claire Booth was a course participant in 2000. In recent years, she has returned to supervise the work of three singers each year while the young fledgling composers are now given the opportunity to write for voice as well as for ensemble. 

A big change for the course came in 2009 when it was made possible to use the Britten Studio for both rehearsal and performance. Previously, rehearsals were held in the Recital Room (Britten-Pears Building) with the final concert held in Snape Maltings Concert Hall thus allowing very little time for performers to adjust to the radical differences in acoustics between the two performing spaces. 

This year a half-dozen young composers entered the fray with their work performed by the Britten Pears Contemporary Ensemble, conducted by Jonathan Berman and Claudia Fuller, to practically a full and admiring house. The Britten Studio was hyperactive with some excellent writing coming from a fascinating bunch of young, aspiring and intelligent composers who excelled in their respective pieces all receiving their world premières. 

The concert featured Alex Tay’s britmod, a chamber symphony set to a text by Emily Dickinson, Mingdu Li’s Time, Temp (text by the composer), Liucilė Vilimaitė’s Kosminė Cenzūras (Cosmic Censorship) with a text by Marija Mazula, Hy-Khang Dang’s Sur l’emploi du temps (text by Seneca),  Sam Rudd-Jones’ Baseline (text by Pedro Juarez Rosello) and Jasper Eaglesfield’s No Garden, No Flowers.  

All the works (each about five minutes’ in length) were exciting, adventurous and captivating employing various permutations of the Britten Pears Contemporary Ensemble ranging from three/four players to full ensemble while the engaging personalities of singers Jennifer Kreider (soprano) and Joanne Evans (mezzo-soprano) shone through while they were totally confident and professional in their chosen pieces. 

Complementing the work of the course participants were exciting and adventurous pieces comprising Helen Grime’s Prayer (‘Eight Songs from Isolation 2020’), Mark-Anthony Turnage’s Eulogy, Alexander Goehr’s idėes fixes and Kaija Saariaho’s Miranda’s Lament (The Tempest) with Colin Matthews contributing a couple of items to the programme with Two Tributes dating from 1998 comprising ‘Little Continuum’, a present for Elliott Carter on his 90th birthday and ‘Elegeia’ written in memory of the renowned cellist, Christopher van Kampen, in which the cello remained silent. 

Purcell: King Arthur - Gabrieli Consort & Players, Paul McCreesh
Aldeburgh Festival (Photo: Britten Pears Arts)

The performance of Purcell’s five-act semi-opera, King Arthur (or The British Worthy), set to a text by John Dryden, roused the senses and filled the mind whilst also filling Snape Maltings Concert Hall to the brim. An excited audience was treated to a prime and exacting performance by the Gabrieli Consort and Players under the direction of Paul McCreesh. The work contains some of Purcell’s most lyrical and charming writing whilst employing the most adventurous harmonies of his day. 

Paul McCreesh is the best and picks the best therefore the audience was lapping up the artistry (and flashy showmanship) of such fine sopranos as Anna Dennis, Mhairi Lawson and Rowan Pierce while the high tenor voices of Jeremy Budd and Christopher Fitzgerald-Lombard hit the mark, too, with Matthew Long and Tom Castle’s tenor voices complementing very well the rich and deep-sounding bass voices of Marcus Farnsworth and Ashley Riches. Perfect harmony all round! 

A simple plot, the scenario’s based on the battles between King Arthur’s Britons and the Saxons rather than the legends of Camelot. A Restoration spectacular, the work includes such supernatural characters as Cupid and Venus plus references to the Germanic gods of the Saxons: Woden, Thor and Freya.  

A well-loved story, the scenario centres on Arthur's endeavours to recover his fiancée, the blind Cornish Princess Emmeline, who has been abducted by his arch enemy, Oswald, the Saxon king of Kent. It is widely thought that Dryden wrote the original libretto in 1684 to mark the 25th anniversary of King Charles II’s Restoration the following year. 

There are so many exhilarating and formidable scenes in King Arthur played out in five supreme acts. For instance, the frost scene in the third act, one of Purcell's most famous achievements, harbours bold contrasts of style with the masterly piling up of the music to a climactic ending with the chorus joyously engaged in a terrific rendering of ‘Tis Love that has Warmed us’ while the art of pantomime came to the fore in Act II (‘Philidel and Grimbald in an enchanted wood in the Kentish countryside’) witnessing Philidel and the Chorus running wild prancing all over the show in ‘Hither this way’ - which way, Anne Hathaway! 

And in Act V (‘A masque for Britannia and St George’) Comus and the Peasants went overboard with the men of the Gabrieli Players rustically singing their hearts’ out in ‘Your hay it is mow’d’ as if on a stag night out quietly followed by Anna Dennis as Venus calming things down a bit by delivering a fine and detailed rendering of ‘Fairest Isle, all isles excelling’ with the whole show wrapped up by ‘New Song and Chorus for Britannia and St George: Sound Heroes, your brazen trumpets sound! - Let all rehearse.’ 

Paul McCreesh and his lot have been performing King Arthur for a very long time but this fine (and memorable) concert performance of Purcell’s famous and exuberant work forming part of the 76th Aldeburgh Festival would take some beating. Full stop! 

As an aside, I lovingly recall a memorable staged version of King Arthur produced by the English Opera Group featuring the Thames Chamber orchestra, conducted by Philip Ledger, in St Andrew’s Hall, Norwich, as part of the 1970 Norfolk & Norwich Triennial Festival - my ‘home’ festival. 

Directed by Colin Graham a star cast included Benjamin Luxon (Arthur), Robert Tear (Oswald), David Hartley (Guillamar), Denis Dowling (Merlin), Paul Wade (Conon), Michael Rippon (Aurelius), April Cantelo (Emmeline), Norma Burrowes (Grimbald) and Annabel Hunt (Philidel). Optimistic and hopeful: how lovely it would be to see the English Opera Group brought back to life next year on the 50th anniversary of Britten’s death. Over the past few years Aldeburgh has built up a repertoire of chamber operas that would surely fit the company’s rebirth. Watch this space! 

Reviewed by Tony Cooper

Never miss out on future posts by following us

The blog is free, but I'd be delighted if you were to show your appreciation by buying me a coffee.

Elsewhere on this blog

• That was quite a party! Paul Curran's production of Die Fledermaus at The Grange Festival makes for a terrific evening in the theatre  - review
• Modern resonances & musical style: Richard Farnes conducts Verdi's La traviata at the Grange Festival with Samantha Clarke & Nico Darmanin - opera review 
• Maiden, Mother & Crone: Rowan Hellier on her interdisciplinary project integrating music & movement exploring Baba Yaga - interview
• The Merry Widow meets the Godfather: Scottish Opera brings John Savournin's production of Lehár's operetta to Opera Holland Park - review
• Enjoyment, exploration & sheer virtuosic fun: Sisters from Karine Deshayes & Delphine Haidan - record review
• The earth moves: Antoine Brumel's 12-part Earthquake Mass & Tallis' 40-part motet from Peter Phillips & The Tallis Scholars - concert review
• Lieder, songs and sonnets: David Butt Philip in Vaughan Williams, Alma Mahler, Wagner & Britten at Wigmore Hall - concert review
• A Visit to Friends: The opening work of the Aldeburgh Festival’s 76th edition fell to Colin Matthews’ first foray into opera - opera review
• A sonic portrait of British Jewish families: composer Na'ama Zisser on the JMI Archive - interview
• The one where Dido kills Aeneas: Oliver Platt radically refocuses Purcell's opera at Guildhall School - opera review
• Home