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Aldeburgh Festival 2010

The Times

The Financial Times

The Telegraph

The Times, 14 June 2010 Hilary Finch
Aldeburgh Festival at Snape Maltings

Pierre-Laurent Aimard’s second season as artistic director at Aldeburgh is yielding little big-time Britten and few significant premieres. Instead, he has chosen to make his mark with alliances: with musician friends, and with one composer’s take on another.

Aimard is throwing an extended fiftieth birthday party for his colleague, George Benjamin. This began not with anything new, but with John Fulljames’s production of Benjamin’s dark, oblique response to the tale of the Pied Piper. Into the Little Hill was, once again, played in all its pungent, ironic precision by the London Sinfonietta; and Susan Bickley and Claire Booth made us hang on every word in their now assured parts of Mother and Child, Minister and Stranger.

Benjamin’s chamber opera was all but upstaged by its companion piece: Berio’s Recital 1. This virtuoso piece of music-theatre, superbly sung and acted by Susan Bickley, looks into the disturbed mind of a recitalist-diva, grippingly penetrating the tragi-comic traumas of performance.

Saturday night’s concert, with the Britten Sinfonia conducted by Aimard, included Benjamin’s transcription of Bach, with the British premiere of his Canon and Fugue from The Art of Fugue. Bach’s encyclopaedia of counterpoint is already matched by a thesaurus of arrangements: this one, for flute, two horns, three violins, two violas and cello, is wonderfully fanciful, pitting long strides of flute and horn against fizzing pizzicato.

Then Berio once more — and his transcription of the final, unfinished fugue from The Art of Fugue. In the Maltings’ acoustic it displayed a warm and reverberant palette of rich-hued colours, ending in a dissolving cluster of notes that spelled out Bach’s name.

A morning concert in Aldeburgh Church introduced a series of concerts celebrating past festival directors. Nothing if not inward-looking, the series began inauspiciously with only the brilliance of Thomas Adès’s Catch and Court Studies from The Tempest brightening somewhat dingy performances from the Hebrides Ensemble of John Woolrich’s uninspired A Farewell and Sestina, and Britten’s Gemini Variations.

The Financial Times, 13 June 2010, Andrew Clark
Aldeburgh Festival, Suffolk, UK

Is music only about sound? In pop, the visuals are as influential as the sounds. Even in classical concerts, looks and platform manner are fast becoming integral to the way music communicates. But that is all physical distraction. In his lecture for the Aldeburgh festival’s opening weekend, Vincent Walsh, professor of human brain research at University College London, argued that, thanks to cross-wiring in the brain, colour can play as big a role in musical perception as sound.

Citing Messiaen, who claimed his association of colours and sounds was “not imagination or a physical phenomenon but an inward reality”, Walsh said about 4 per cent of the population experienced “chatter” between areas of the brain in a way that made them perceive things with more than one sense – a condition known as synaesthesia.

You might wonder why such academic subjects are being discussed on the Suffolk coast. Well, one of the themes at Aldeburgh this summer is “music and the brain”, and Pierre-Laurent Aimard, the festival’s artistic director, happens to stand at the cerebral end of the world’s classical elite. Under his influence Aldeburgh has become the thinking person’s festival. His programmes are surprising and intricately woven. They form a unity in the mind out of the greatest variety of materials.

By raising the festival’s intellectual bar, Aimard has exploded the idea of Aldeburgh as a cosy seaside retreat for English composers. The very fact that he is a far-travelled performer, and French, means he is free of the insularity to which Aldeburgh has often been susceptible in the post-Britten era. But it remains a composers’ festival, thanks to Aimard’s links with Messiaen, Boulez and other beacons of musical Modernism. For Aldeburgh, that is a fresher wind than any North Sea air.

But Walsh’s lecture inadvertently revealed the limitations of the intellectual approach. When asked about managing emotions in sound perception, he said this was “outside my area – I just manage the brain”. Useful as it may be to analyse the mind, musical responses are surely as much about the heart and the gut. Incontrovertible evidence came immediately after the lecture in Norwegian pianist Hakon Austbo’s barnstorming performances of two Scriabin sonatas and extracts from Messiaen’s Vingt regards. You couldn’t hope to separate out colours from such a complex harmonic/melodic torrent. In that context, synaesthesia seems a crude way of explaining sound perception.

The limitations of the brain were also exposed in Saturday morning’s chamber recital at Aldeburgh parish church. The programme was themed around the inspiration three previous festival directors had found in other composers’ music – a nice idea on paper that fell flat in performance. There is a willow grows, an orchestral piece by Bridge that the 18-year-old Britten adapted for viola and piano, was as drab as John Woolrich’s A Farewell, an impression made worse by the Hebrides Ensemble’s glum rendition. Charismatic clarinettist Yann Ghiro brought life to Thomas Adès’s Catch, and the same composer’s Court Studies from The Tempest made a scintillating finale.

Echoes of Britten still haunt the festival – not least in a Red House exhibition celebrating the centenary of Peter Pears, the composer’s muse – but they were hard to trace in weekend performances at Snape Maltings. The Britten Sinfonia’s Bach – the keyboard concerto in D and Brandenburg No 5, with Aimard playing a concert grand – was flattened by a mushy acoustic. Aimard came good in a second half devoted to Berio, Boulez and George Benjamin, whose At First Light (1982) was revealed as a masterpiece of the modern orchestral repertoire, pregnant with expressive ideas and exquisite effects.

Which made his musical fable Into the Little Hill on Friday all the more perplexing. Premiered four years ago in Paris, this is Benjamin’s first serious attempt at music theatre. It is a jewel of its kind, an impression intensified by John Fulljames’s production starring Claire Booth and Susan Bickley. But it keeps the drama at one remove. In its search for linear lyricism, it suggests Benjamin has gone soft.

The Telegraph, 14 June, Michael White
Aldeburgh's opening weekend: a challenge for those of us who love it

It’s common that publication of the Queen’s Birthday honours list coincides with the opening weekend of the Aldeburgh festival, but that’s as far as the connection normally goes.

This year it went further. One of the few musical gongs went to George Benjamin, a CBE. And Benjamin’s entrancing chamber opera Into the Little Hill was the weekend’s main event, playing at Snape Maltings with the London Sinfonietta on top form as the on-stage band and Susan Bickley and Clare Booth repeating their acclaimed peformances in the two singing roles.

But repeating is the key word here. It was the same show, same production, same everything that has already played in London and other venues around the UK. Most people with a serious interest in new opera will probably have seen it before, so it wasn’t quite the “event” that you expect of Aldeburgh openings. And although the stage director, John Fulljames, had knocked together a new bit of music-theatre for it to play alongside as a double-bill – a revisitation of Berio’s scena about a distraught soprano on the edge of breakdown, Recital 1 – it still lacked pulling power to get the critics down from London. I can’t recall an Aldeburgh opening where there were so few of us.

As someone who loves Aldeburgh dearly, to the point of distraction, I was worried by this. And by the sense that much of the weekend wasn’t of the standard Aldeburgh generally commands. Saturday morning brought a classic programme in the parish church of chamber music by past or present festival directors – Britten, Ades, Woolrich – and that was fine. But Snape Maltings on Saturday night had a concert of Bach, Boulez and Benjamin that badly didn’t work.

Given by Pierre-Laurent Aimard with the Britten Sinfonia, the modern elements were well enough done (although the London Sinfonietta would have done them better still) with oboist Nick Daniel the hero of the night. But the Bach – a keyboard concerto and a Brandenburg, both directed from a modern Steinway by Aimard – was appalling: brutal, leaden, rough, stylistically insensitive. It might as well have been tub-thumping Liszt for all the period nuance Aimard brought to it; and I’m tempted to say that so far as the keyboard playing was concerned, it was the shoddiest Bach I’ve ever heard on a major concert stage.

Sunday morning things cheered up on the beach with some joyous community music-making, deftly masterminded by composer David Knotts and a welcome reminder that, at its best, Aldeburgh knows how to make a festival festive. And on Sunday afternoon Blythborough Church housed an attractive though frustratingly fragmentary bits-and-pieces programme of Schutz and Gabrieli by a new ensemble called La Musica Nuova. But then Sunday evening came more problems with a piano recital by the veteran Leon Fleisher.

Fleisher is of course a legendary figure – almost 82 – whose career was reduced to left-hand-only for several decades by a problem with the right. In the past six or seven years he’s been using both. And that history if nothing else makes him interesting. But time has told.

For Aldeburgh he played an engagingly clever programme of dance music for piano – Schubert & Brahms waltzes, Dvorak Hungarian dances, Ravel Valses Nobles et Sentimentales, and an arrangement of La Valse. But in his hands, these dances were not danceable. They were ghosts of dances, resurrected from some distant memory with delicate but tortuous slowness. And, alas, an awful lot of finger-slips.
Some sense of what he once was came through in the poised patrician calm of the performance. But beneath it he was struggling, sometimes badly. And there was perhaps a wry admission of defeat in his choice of encore: an ear-worm of a piece by William Bolcom called Graceful Ghost Rag. What we heard here wasn’t just the spectre of a set of dances but the spectre of a pianist: great, much-loved, but gone.
I should add that the Dvorak dances and La Valse were done as four-handers with a young woman called Katherine Jacobson Fleisher. I assumed she was his daughter but am told she is his wife. Well, good for him.

Questions remain, though, as to the future good of the Aldeburgh Festival. Perhaps this weekend was just unlucky. Perhaps its lack of distinction was the consequence of some deliberate plan on Aimard’s part, holding his fire until Pierre Boulez turns up for a belated Aldeburgh debut later in the run.

With Boulez, at least, Aimard will be on sure home-ground: his qualities as keyboard champion of the French contemporary avant-garde are undisputed. And to the extent that he provides a connection with the cutting edge of new music in mainland Europe, I can understand why Aldeburgh appointed him in the first place. He brings credibility, clout, and chic. But after only one season in situ (this is his second) he hasn’t proved himself the right man in the right job. His sympathies are not with the kind of repertoire that Aldeburgh stands for. And notoriously, he isn’t keen on Britten.
Next season, his third, marks the end of his initial contract. I have a gut feeling it may not be renewed.