Darker than a starless night

Clear as a sky without a cloud
may be a mother's mind,
but darker than a starless night
with not one gleam, not one,
no gleam to show the way.

The Madwoman arrives at the ferry in Benjamin Britten's first church parable Curlew River. Photograph taken this afternoon inland from Aldeburgh. More on Curlew River here.
Photo (c) On An Overgrown Path 2007. Report broken links, missing images and errors to - overgrownpath at hotmail dot co dot uk

Britten's sea interludes via webcam

See the Suffolk seascape that inspired so much of Benjamin Britten's music in real time via the new Snape webcam, screen grab above. You will also see the weather that I'm experiencing!

Check out the multi-media clips while on the Aldeburgh Music website. And more images of Aldeburgh here.
Any copyrighted material on these pages is included as "fair use", for the purpose of study, review or critical analysis only, and will be removed at the request of copyright owner(s). Report broken links, missing images and errors to - overgrownpath at hotmail dot co dot uk

US foundation backs Aldeburgh's inspiration

Aldeburgh Music's inspirational plans to realise Benjamin Britten and Peter Pears' artistic vision for Snape have received backing from an American funding body, The Kresge Foundation. Aldeburgh are now just £380,000 ($792k) short of the £14m ($29.1m) funding target for their new creative campus, which can be seen in the accompanying images. The Kresge Foundation have offered a £250,000 ($521k) 'challenge grant' to be awarded if the balance of £130,000 ($271k) is raised by public subscription.


Wonderful news given the strong historical links between Britten and the US. Now help build the future of new music by donating here. Read more about the new campus here, and read an interview with Aldeburgh Music's chief executive here.
Any copyrighted material on these pages is included as "fair use", for the purpose of study, review or critical analysis only, and will be removed at the request of copyright owner(s). Report broken links, missing images and other errors to - overgrownpath at hotmail dot co dot uk

Royal Opera House loses the plot

The advertisement above is from the Royal Opera House's current press campaign. Their production of Parsifal, which gets a tiny mention bottom left, is conducted by Bernard Haitink (age 78) and John Tomlinson (age 61) is singing Gurnemanz. Which makes it one of the musical events of the year in my book. But, sadly, Holy Fools don't have as much sex(ist), or age appeal, as a 29 year old soprano.

Below is an advertisement from the programme for another memorable musical event in London, Otto Klemperer's 1961 London Beethoven Festival. It is followed by part of the acceptance speech Maestro Klemperer made when he was awarded an honorary doctorate in law from Occidental College, Los Angeles.


'The lawyer fights for justice; his highest duty is to go and permanently fight for innocent people, to save their life against the attacks of their enemies. And what are we doing, we musicians? We fight for the innocent Lady Music. Is she not accused? I think she is. She is accused of being useless, a thing of luxury. And is she not innocent? Is there any reason to condemn music to death? I do not believe it. The contrary is true. We musicians have to protect this noble Lady, Music; we have to save her from the attacks of materialism'.

Attitudes towards Lady Music have changed very little in some parts since that speech was given on 24 September 1936. But recognition of her contribution is increasing. A wonderful book has just been published which chronicles an important contribution to twentieth-century music. It celebrates the life and work of Imogen Holst, who was an important influence on English music for more than three decades, and who worked alongside that great figure of twentieth-century music, Benjamin Britten, for twelve years.

The stereotype of Aldeburgh portrays it as an exclusively male domain. But the inclusiveness of that most musical of places is reflected in the location of Imogen Holst's grave, alongside that of Britten and Peter Pears in Aldeburgh churchyard. The words on her headstone, from her father Gustav Holst's Hymn of Jesus, deliver a message that is still not fully understood today:

The heavenly spheres make music for us
All things join in the dance

Now join in the dance here, here, here, here, here, here, here and here, and read about Britten's women here.
The Beethoven Symphonies advertisement comes from my own collection. The Occidental College speech is from Klemperer on Music (Toccata Press ISBN 0907689132) - highly recommended for advertising agencies everywhere. Imogen Holst - A Life in Music is published by Boydell & Brewer ISBN 9781843832966. Any copyrighted material on these pages is included as "fair use", for the purpose of study, review or critical analysis only, and will be removed at the request of copyright owner(s). Report broken links, missing images and other errors to - overgrownpath at hotmail dot co dot uk

New classical recording becomes hot property

A classical record label suffered a major setback when master copies of its debut projects were stolen during a burglary in London. The files were stored on a laptop belonging to Court Lane Music, which was taken during a break-in at an apartment near London's South Bank.

The material included a choral disc scheduled for possible release on the Naxos label, and the final edit of a world premiere recording of Imogen Holst's string chamber music Imogen Holst was daughter of Gustav Holst and assistant to Benjamin Britten. The photo above shows Holst and Britten together in the 1950s. The Holst disc, which had already been previewed on BBC Radio, was due for release on October 22nd to celebrate the composer's centenary, but will now be postponed.

Thomas Hewitt Jones, producer at Court Lane Music, said: "We are absolutely devastated. This recording represented several months of work. Thankfully,the intruders did not take all of our backup drives, so we're hopeful we can salvage most of the disc from the original source files of the Imogen Holstrecording session. But we will have to re-record the choral disc in early 2008."

Thomas, a songwriter and TV/Film composer, also lost many original compositions that were stored on the stolen computers. Despite the loss, a promotional live tour of music by Imogen Holst and Frank Bridge will still be going ahead in November, with performances at the Holst Museum, Cheltenham, and the Britten-Pears Library in Aldeburgh.

Imogen Holst minitour November 2007
Cheltenham - 2 November, St Andrew's Church (in association with the HolstMuseum)Swansea - 3 November, St Mary's Church
Aldeburgh - 4 November, Britten-Pears Library
London Hampstead - 7 November, Burgh House
All concerts start at 7.30pm. Tickets online or by phone 020 7060 0607. Cheltenham tickets (2 November) from the Holst Museum on 01242 524846

More on the Imogen Holst centenary here.
Picture credit Britten-Pears Foundation. Any copyrighted material on these pages is included as "fair use", for the purpose of study, review or critical analysis only, and will be removed at the request of copyright owner(s). Report broken links, missing images and other errors to - overgrownpath at hotmail dot co dot uk

Aldeburgh has always been about the new

Contemporary music is flourishing in Aldeburgh. Thomas Adès is the Festival's artistic director, innovative programming is pulling in new audiences, traditional musical boundaries are disappearing, and an inspirational £14m ($28m) creative campus will make new music available to future generations.

Teamwork has played a vital role, but much of the credit for this success must go to Aldeburgh Music's chief executive Jonathan Reekie, who came to Suffolk in 1998 from Almeida Opera. The photo above shows Jonathan (left) talking to Bob Shingleton at Snape during this exclusive interview for On An Overgrown Path:

BS - What is 'Aldeburgh Music', and what is its remit?

JR - Aldeburgh Music was founded by the composer Benjamin Britten and singer Peter Pears in 1948, when they set up a Festival based in their home town of Aldeburgh. It’s remit draws on the original principles they established. These were to nurture talent by mixing established musical stars with emerging artists, to focus on the new, and to be rooted in the local community.

BS - How is Aldeburgh Music funded?

JR - In simple terms a third comes from box office income, a third by fundraising, and a third from the government via Arts Council England.

BS - How does the relationship between Aldeburgh Music and the Britten Pears Foundation work?

JR (below) - Aldeburgh Music looks after Britten’s “living” legacy – his Festival, the Britten–Pears Young Artist Programme, the education programmes and Snape Maltings concert hall. The Britten–Pears Foundation is our separate sister organisation, responsible for Britten’s music and archive and is based at the house in Aldeburgh where Britten and Pears lived for many years. The Foundation receives all of Britten’s royalty income, and some of it goes to supports us. We work closely together.


BS - Is Britten still an influence on contemporary festivals, and how do you decide how much of his music is programmed today at Aldeburgh?

JR- For the Festival his principles are arguably more important than his music. The principles, which I outlined previously, still guide us in what we do, and they give the Aldeburgh Festival its strong identity. The amount of his music performed depends on what feels right and fits with all the other things we want to do. There is no minimum or maximum.

BS - Looking back at the 2007 Aldeburgh Festival what do you view as the high, and low, spots?

JR - The high spots were undoubtedly Britten’s opera Death in Venice, the second Faster than Sound, and the multi-media opera Elephant and Castle. The low spots were the rain stopping the dress rehearsal of Elephant and Castle, which caused us technical problems on the first night

BS - How does your role as chief executive fit with that of Thomas Adès?

JR - Tom’s role as artistic director of the Festival is to help the programme, and to perform in the Festival in June. Mine is year-round and isn’t just artistic, but includes all the business side too. Several people contribute to the programming of the Festival including Tom and the Associate Director, John Woolrich. Aldeburgh Music’s work with young artists, residencies, and developing new opera all feed in ideas and possibilities for the Festival. I act as a gatekeeper to these ideas. Tom always has the final say.

BS - Your background includes opera at Glyndebourne and Almeida, and, as you have said, Yoshi Oida's new production of Death in Venice for this year's Aldeburgh Festival was highly acclaimed. Can more be done with opera, particularly contemporary opera at Snape? Will the new development plans help this?

JR - Opera is an artform that excites me greatly. When music, text, theatre & design combine effectively there is arguably nothing more powerful for an audience. Unfortunately it is an artform that is expensive, complicated and strong on tradition, so fewer and fewer opera companies are prepared or able to take risks. We are at the vanguard of trying to change this, and we put on more new opera than anywhere else in the UK. We also have one of the world’s only programmes for developing the opera writers of tomorrow. The new spaces we are building at Snape (below) will be great for this kind of developmental work and smaller scale opera.


BS - How do your audience demographics compare with other festivals such as the Proms and Glyndebourne.

JR- They are similar, possibly slightly older, because the population of the Suffolk coast is higher than average. They are a great audience, who listen and like to take risks.

BS - Talking of risk taking, you have pushed the boundaries into electronica, World Music and other genres. Is this a conscious strategy, and if so will it go further?

JR - Aldeburgh has always been about the new. Music is changing, boundaries between different genres are dissolving. What we are doing simply reflects this. For example the distance between the cutting edge of “contemporary classical music” (don’t you hate that phrase?) and electronica is arguably very small. They are both musicians trying to do something quite similar, just using a different set of tools.

BS - You talk about using a different set of tools. Does more extensive use of the internet figure in your plans, both for performance and promotion? And, I have to ask this question, do you read music blogs, and how do you see their role?

JR- The internet and other technologies are playing a growing part of our creative output and how we promote. We are doing quite of lot of R&D in this field, and it's just going to get more and more important. I do read blogs when I can but lack of time limits this. It's great that the stranglehold of the printed media is being released by blogs, which are bringing fresh blood to criticism and a new perspective on musical life. At last it feels we can escape the tired cynicism that traps many of the traditional media.

BS - Much has been written elsewhere about the death of classical music, yet Aldeburgh today seems to be flourishing. How do you explain this?

JR - Don’t believe what you read! Yes, in some places, where no-one takes risks, it is certainly stagnating. But at the end of the day if you only put on events that excite you, with a bit of luck they will excite an audience too. Good live music, performed by great artists, will never die. Keep a balance between the familiar and the new, and take risks.

BS - Any hints as to the direction that the 2008 Aldeburgh Festival may take?

JR - No major new directions. But highlights will include a new opera, Ocean of Rain by Yannis Kyriakides, our third Faster than Sound, lots of music by György Kurtag, and new works by Thomas Adès and John Woolrich. See you there!


Jonathan Reekie is seen above looking into the future of contemporary music. The new creative campus being built at Snape is one of the most exciting developments in classical music anywhere. Read about it here.
All photos and text (c) On An Overgrown Path 2007. Report broken links, missing images and other errors to - overgrownpath at hotmail dot co dot uk

New music - Snape Skyscape

The photo above was taken a few hours before last night's world premiere of Giorgio Battistelli's Snape Skyscape. Orford Church can be seen on the skyline. It was here that all three of Britten's Church Parables were given their first performances and recorded, as was his children's opera Noye's Fludde. Snape Skyscape was a commission from Aldeburgh Music, and it was premiered in Snape Maltings, which is just out of my picture to the left, by the Britten-Pears Orchestra conducted by Martyn Brabbins. In his programme note the composer explains:

'The central idea of Snape Skyscape has nothing to do with 'descriptive' or 'programme' music. It's simply about impressions received during my stay in Aldeburgh, a place rich in history that has a special kind of energy. Snape Skyscape can be understood as a small musical fresco, in which the energies of the natural landscape and those of intellectual ceativity intetwine and feed into each other. It's a personal expression of what Aldeburgh means to me. The translation of colour, of the wind, of the sea, into fractal forms inevitably loses something, but it nevertheless conveys some form of meaning.'

Although Giorgio Battistelli distances the work from 'programme' music, Snape Skyscapes is a dazzling invocation of 'pure' Aldeburgh with fractals from Peter Grimes and the brutal North Sea coast. But this is not a backward-looking tribute to a dead master. Paul Griffiths has written 'the past is not a path we and our predecessors have travelled but a labyrinth, and a labyrinth forever in flux.' Britten's music was forever in flux, and post-Britten Aldeburgh, thankfully, remains in flux through Aldeburgh Music's visionary work with new music. Their latest commission, Giorgio Battistelli's Snape Skyscape, is a succession of shimmering musical fractals that are, again, forever in flux. It speaks with a unique voice. But it is a voice relevant both to Britten's own special soundscape, and that of other composers, such as Boulez and Cage, who were writing flux, in the form of chance, into their music elsewhere in the labyrinth.

Snape Skyscape is scored for large orchestra including a range of percussion (a fractal of Prince of the Pagodas), celeste and sampler. It was delivered with persuasive advocacy by the young players of the Britten-Pears Orchestra and Martyn Brabbins. Intelligent marketing resulted in a good, but by no means full, house in deepest rural Suffolk on an autumn evening. Thankfully no embarassing lectures from the podium to introduce the new work, and no Pastoral Symphony to soften the blow of new music. It is a comment on the power of Giorgio Battistelli's (right) new music that the core repertoire that followed seemed anti-climactic. Another work from the labyrinth, Walton's First Symphony from 1935, sounded with much circumference and little circle in the second half.

Now read more about that 'special kind of Aldeburgh energy'.
Programme note with thanks to Aldeburgh Music. Giorgio Battistelli's music is published by Casa Ricordi. Header photo (c) On An Overgrown Path 2007. Any copyrighted material on these pages is included as "fair use", for the purpose of study, review or critical analysis only, and will be removed at the request of copyright owner(s). Report broken links, missing images and other errors to - overgrownpath at hotmail dot co dot uk

New music - the same difference

I asked Roger Wright, head of Radio 3, a few years ago why the BBC didn't broadcast more new music. We get too many complaining letters was his reply - composer Geoffrey Burgon writing in today's Guardian.

If my work is accepted, I must move on to the point where it isn't - John Cage

We are off in a few minutes to Aldeburgh for the first performance of Giorgio Battistelli's (above) Skyscape, which was commissioned by Aldeburgh Music, who, thankfully, aren't worried about complaining letters. Martyn Brabbins conducts the Britten-Pears Orchestra in a thoughtful programme which juxtaposes the new work with Strauss' Four Last Songs and Walton's ebulient First Symphony.

For the drive to Snape I'll slip Geoffrey Burgon's 1976 Requiem into the CD player. Sadly, Burgon's music isn't heard often enough to generate letters of complaint these days. This a genuinely forward looking work, wonderful scoring, and beautiful Kingsway Hall sound. Annoyed of Tunbridge Wells clearly won the day though, as this important Decca CD is now deleted. But hurry, you can still find it online.

Do read Geoffrey Burgon's letter, there is an alternative to new music in safe doses.
Any copyrighted material on these pages is included as "fair use", for the purpose of study, review or critical analysis only, and will be removed at the request of copyright owner(s). Report broken links, missing images and other errors to - overgrownpath at hotmail dot co dot uk

Happy birthday Sir Colin

Sir Colin Davis is 80 years old today. The following post, which I first ran last October, says it all.

Difficult to find the superlatives to describe last night's concert at Snape Maltings with Sir Colin Davis (left) conducting The Combined Orchestra of The Guildhall School of Music and the Royal Academy of Music. This brought together the top players from two of London's (and the world's) leading music conservatoires in a vast orchestra (14 cellos and 12 basses!) that filled the Maltings capacious stage and scarcely left Sir Colin room to make his way to the rostrum. Sir Colin revels in working with young players (his 2005 Prom with an orchestra drawn from the Royal Academy and Juilliard Schools was a highlight of the season) and he has worked regularly at both the Royal Academy and Guildhall.

The programme was Berloz's Overture Béatrice et Bénédict (a Davis speciality), Tchaikovsky's Fantasy Overture Romeo and Juliet, and in the second half Elgar's magnificent Symphony No 1 in A flat major. The 79 year old Sir Colin's Elgar is passionate and red-blooded, in fact close your eyes and you would have thought the conductor was the same age as the players. The intonation and attack of the orchestra belied the large number of players. And the sound, oh the sound ... We are so privileged to have Snape as our 'village hall'; it is brick, the auditorium only holds 700, there are no balconies, and even the seating eschews upholstery to preserve the warmth of the sound. The bottom registers in the packed hall last night were extraordinary, full bodied with real slam, but warm and glowing and never dry.

But above all it was the playing. It would be wrong to say that the quality matched that of the many big-name orchestras I heard at the Proms this year - this student orchestra knocked everyone of them, including the Berlin Philharmonic, into a cocked-hat. It really highlighted the folly of the 'London today, Edinburgh tomorrow' lifestyle of our professional orchestras. In Snape Maltings we heard spontaneity, commitment, enthusiasm and above all risk taking.

Last night rammed home that there is only one form of music, and that is live music. MP3s, CDs, iPods, YouTube and our other technology baubles are just pale shadows of the real thing. And the concert also rammed home that the future of live music making is safe in the hands of the young players of the Guildhall School, Royal Academy and all the other music colleges around the world. As we made our way out of the Maltings car park after the concert the young players passed us laughing, joking and buzzing with adrenalin as they boarded the fleet of buses to take them on the foggy late night 100 mile drive back from Suffolk to London. Elgar denied that there was any programme to his A flat major symphony, but told friends it expressed "a wide experience of human life with great love and massive hope for the future". Amen to that.

* Notable students of the Royal Academy of Music: Sir Harrison Birtwistle, John Dankworth, Lesley Garrett, Evelyn Glennie, Sir Elton John, Dame Felicity Lott, Joanna MacGregor, Michael Nyman and Sir Simon Rattle.

* Notable students of the Guildhall School of Music and Drama - Susan Chilcott, Dido, Sir James Galway, Dave Holland, Paul Lewis, Tasmin Little, Sir George Martin, Anne Sophie von Otter, Jacqueline du Pré, Bryn Terfel and Janice Watson.

* Sir Colin's live (Barbican) recording of Elgar 1 with a professional orchestra on LSO Live is highly recommended, available from Prelude Records and other good record stores.

Now read about the delight of the classical music industry.
Image credit: Lower photo is of Royal Academy players, but Royal Academy Aarhus, Denmark which by sheer coincidence takes us down another Overgrown Path. Any copyrighted material on these pages is included as "fair use", for the purpose of study, review or critical analysis only, and will be removed at the request of copyright owner(s). Report broken links, missing images and other errors to - overgrownpath at hotmail dot co dot uk

I'm away on a sea interlude

On An Overgrown Path is taking a sea interlude until the end of September. To reduce maintenance I've locked the post facility, but you can still email me via - overgrownpath at hotmail dot co dot uk. And you can still listen to my Overgrown Path radio programme on Future Radio while I away at 5.00pm UK time on Sunday evenings, click here for the audio stream (real time only). The featured composers are:

Sept 2 - Terry Riley & John Adams
Sept 9 - Beata Moon, Elizabeth Maconchy, Elisabeth Lutyens & Vanessa Lann
Sept 16 - Judith Weir, Morten Lauridsen & Bayan Northcott
Sept 23 - Lou Harrison

Follow this path for highlights of the last twelve month's posts, and this one for contemporary composers worth exploring. While I'm away support the other fine music blogs here. Remember, it's the music that matters.

Convert Overgrown Path radio on-air times to your local time zone using this link. Windows Media Player doesn't like the audio stream very much and takes ages to buffer. WinAmp or iTunes handle it best. Unfortunately the royalty license doesn't permit on-demand replay, so you have to listen in real time. If you are in the Norwich, UK area tune to 96.9FM. Photo of Aldeburgh beach (c) On An Overgrown Path. Any copyrighted material on these pages is included as "fair use", for the purpose of study, review or critical analysis only, and will be removed at the request of copyright owner(s). Report broken links, missing images and other errors to - overgrownpath at hotmail dot co dot uk

Frank Zappa comes to Aldeburgh

I suspect that last night's Snape Prom was the first time that the music of Frank Zappa has been played at Aldeburgh. Earlier in their set Scottish based cross-genre band Mr McFall's Chamber had given the English premiere of a commission from Gavin Bryars, and they finished with a stomping version for string quartet, piano and bass of Zappa's G Spot Tornado (that link is a video performance). Particularly interesting, in view of recent posts, is the connection between Frank Zappa and Pierre Boulez (last link is video).

Listen to an audio sample of Mr McFall's Chamber here. Photo of Boulez and Zapp from ZapInFrance. Any copyrighted material on these pages is included as "fair use", for the purpose of study, review or critical analysis only, and will be removed at the request of copyright owner(s). Report broken links, missing images and other errors to - overgrownpath at hotmail dot co dot uk

Holiday weekend - Aldeburgh

Mstislav Rostropovich relaxes against Benjamin Britten's Alvis in Aldeburg. The photo is undated but was probably taken in summer 1961. Now take a drive through Britten's Aldeburgh, but be careful, the composer was a notoriously speedy driver. Which prompts the question - is classical music too fast?
Photo from Humphrey Carpenter's book Benjamin Britten, A Biography (Faber ISBN 0571143253). Any copyrighted material on these pages is included as "fair use", for the purpose of study, review or critical analysis only, and will be removed at the request of copyright owner(s). Report broken links, missing images and other errors to - overgrownpath at hotmail dot co dot uk

How long is long enough?

Three wonderful concerts in just over a week left me wondering how long is long enough? At Norwich Cathedral last Friday Stephen Layton with Polyphony, Trinity College Choir and the Britten Sinfonia offered a concert of glorious Poulenc and Messiaen lasting 64 minutes excluding the interval. The second half comprised just the Poulenc Gloria, which lasted 27 minutes. The duration of 64 minutes is, of course, the length of a CD, which is no coincidence as the programme will be recorded by Hyperion in the next few days for future CD release.

But 27 minutes doesn't take my prize for the shortest programme half. Just eight days before at Snape, the up and coming Russian Alexander Polianichko conducted the Britten Pears Orchestra in a stunning second half of just the 1919 version of Stravinsky's Firebird. Now at little over 20 minutes that takes my prize for the shortest ever programme half. Can any readers beat it?

Just hours after the fleeting Firebird we experienced programme planning going too far the other way at nearby Blythburgh Church. Now this is a very famous venue, not the least for Benjamin Britten's performances which I wrote about here. Blythburgh is a glorious church with glorious acoustics, but it does have its problems as a concert venue. There are no, what they call at Disney Hall, amenities. The car park is a grass field which becomes a bog in wet weather. And the rest rooms, as they call them over on Sequenza21, are two agricutural sheds down a grass slope at the rear of the church. But the fact that that Ben and Peter used these very urinals gives a whole new meaning to the word resonance.


To historic Blythburgh and its agricultural amenities came the brilliant young vocal group Exaudi (who featured in my Elisabeth Lutyens article) and viol consort Fretwork with a suitably sombre programme of sacred music for the Saturday between Good Friday and Easter Day. Now Good Friday is a fine time to do penance. But twelve o'clock on a Saturday is not so good for 90 minutes of Christian Geist, Heinrich Schütz and Arvo Pärt (his exquisite Stabat Mater in the arrangement by Macolm Bruno for viols) without an interval.

As the excellent performance progressed it was clear that the great and good among the Aldeburgh Easter Festival goers had booked lunch in nearby Southwold's trendy restaurants. In order not to lose their tables the audience was slowly slipping away, just like the North Sea tide that you see in my accompanying photos. Exaudi's young director, James Weeks, rose to the occasion like a true professional, and announced that the eight verses of Christian Geist's Es war aber would be truncated to two in the interests of gastronomy, and we were released into the glorious Easter sunshine with Schütz's mercifully short motet Die mit Tränen säen ringing in our ears.

But this Overgrown Path has a happy ending. We would never leave a concert early for something as mundane as a restaurant booking. After relishing the superb Blythburgh concert to its proper conclusion we enjoyed our tasty picnic (and just a little wine) at nearby Aldeburgh. The photos of Iken Church (the village of Iken is the setting for Britten's The Little Sweep) and the Alde estuary which accompany this article were taken near our picnic site. With views like this long can never be long enough.


Now talking of sacred music, read about L'Orgue Mystique
Any copyrighted material on these pages is included as "fair use", for the purpose of study, review or critical analysis only, and will be removed at the request of copyright owner(s). Report broken links, missing images and other errors to - overgrownpath at hotmail dot co dot uk

Britten celebrated with new music campus

Benjamin Britten, composer, pianist, conductor, pacifist, humanitarian, and visionary, died on December 4th 1976. Today I celebrate the thirtieth anniversary of his death with the remarkable story of how he left not just a legacy of 20th century masterpieces, but also a remarkable vision which is about to be realised after three decades.


It was the dearest wish of both the composer and his life partner Peter Pears that a music centre should be created at Snape Maltings, and in 2006 comes the exciting news that this vision is to become reality. Over the next three years the ambitious plan is to transform the musical life of the Suffolk coast immortalised in Peter Grimes and other Britten compositions. Drawing on the inspiring landscape, Snape Maltings will become the first dedicated music campus in Europe where top artists from around the world can realise their full potential and connect with a wider public.


The plan is to establish a ‘creative campus’ on the Snape Maltings site, providing the perfect environment for leading artists to work alongside the next generation of musicians. The new campus will provide a catalyst for Aldeburgh’s other work, generating more performances, new commissions, and touring opportunities. It will provide additional high-quality facilities for the Britten-Pears Young Artists Programme and for their acclaimed work with schools and the wider community.


A budget of £12m ($22m) will be used to purchase a 999 year lease for the legendary concert hall complex, and will also purchase and redevelop adjacent redundant buildings. The new workspaces will complement those already in use, and will combine the simple austerity of the Victorian buildings with the technical needs of the 21st century musician. The centrepiece of the scheme is a large new studio, bigger than the main concert hall stage, and suitable for orchestral rehearsals. It will have excellent acoustics combined with the flexibility and high levels of sound insulation required for recording. Arup Acoustics, the consultancy responsible for the near perfect sound in the main Maltings auditorium, has been retained for the project. When not being used for rehearsals, the new studio will serve as a 340 seat performance venue.


An old malt kiln on the site will be renovated to provide a space large enough to accommodate instrumental groups, and chamber and music-theatre rehearsals, and will be equipped for video/electro-acoustic installations. For performances 80 seats will be available in a flexible configuration, and the renovation will retain the double height space of the original kiln, together with as much of the existing fabric as possible. In addition to these impressive performance spaces the new scheme will create two smaller fully sound-proofed rehearsal studios.


‘Dead Europeans’ and other perjoratives have been used in the past to describe the generations of composers that reached their culmination at the end of the 20th century with Britten and his contemporaries. Britten’s vision was responsible for the building, and rebuilding after the disastrous fire, of Snape Maltings, and the establishment there of one of the world’s foremost contemporary music festivals. There can be no more fitting testament to the continuing influence of Benjamin Britten thirty years after his death than the fulfillment of his vision through the creation of Europe’s first dedicated music campus.

Now read Britten’s manifesto – Music does not exist in a vacuum

With acknowledgements to Aldeburgh Music. For photos of the Snape redevelopment follow this link. Any copyrighted material on these pages is included for "fair use", for the purpose of study, review or critical analysis only, and will be removed at the request of copyright owner(s). Report broken links, missing images and other errors to - overgrownpath at hotmail dot co dot uk

Britten shows how everybody can make music

'Everybody can make music. Everybody can compose, somehow. When you want to teach children sports, they play football, or get given a tennis racket, they don't simply watch. But when we want them to be involved in music, we ask them to sit passively. This is surely not the right concept' - Simon Rattle tells it like it is in today's Observer, in an article about the Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra's dance project with marginalised children. How true, and I read those words while still on an emotional high from making music for the first, and probably last time in a Britten performance in Snape Maltings under the baton of Stephen Layton.

Tomorrow (December 4th) is the thirtieth anniversary of Benjamin Britten's death. Last night I was at a performance of his cantata St Nicholas as part of Aldeburgh's Britten Weekend, and my music making was a vocal contribution to the two congregational hymns in that wonderful work. They may only be congregational hymns, but the audience were given the sheet music, and in a pre-performance rehearsal Stephen Layton even reprimanded us for not observing the pianissimo marking for the first entry of God Moves In A Mysterious Way.

What an uplifting evening. Not just for the communal music making of almost one thousand voices celebrating Britten's genius, but also for Aldeburgh's continuing commitment to nurturing young musicians. Specific praise goes to the exquisite performance of the Ceremony of Carols by the high voices of the Choir of Trinity College, Cambridge, and the contributions of the young harpist Sally Pryce and the outstanding young tenor Allan Clayton who sung Nicholas, surely a star in the making? The full programme is given below, and the first half was performed as a continuous sequence, without applause. It ended as the bell tolled for the last time in Arvo Pärt's Cantus in memoriam Benjamin Britten with the capacity audience holding their collective breath and the bows of the Britten Sinfonia violins frozen in mid-air. A moment of sheer musical, and emotional magic.

But my special Britten champagne moment came even before the music started. To the side of the Snape auditorium is the box that Britten and Pears created for themselves. To call it a box is too grandiose term, it little more than a slit in the raw brickwork of the Maltings. The boy soloists for St Nicholas watched the first half of the evening from Britten's box. Before the concert started the four very young trebles from Ely Cathedral Choir, immaculately dressed in school uniform, leant over the front of the box laughing and waving to friends in the audience. It was a pure Britten moment. Their faces radiated youth, exuberance, total innocence, and above all a dazzling hope for the future.

Programme for Snape Maltings Concert Hall, December 2nd 2006

Frank Bridge (1879-1941)
Sir Roger de Coverley (A Christmas Dance) (1922)

Benjamin Britten (1913-1976)
A Hymn to the Virgin (1930; Rev 1934)
A Ceremony of Carols, Op. 28 (1942; rev. 1943)
Theme from 'A Boy was Born', Op. 3 (1932-3; rev 157-8)

Arvo Pärt (b. 1935)
Cantus in memoriam Benjamin Britten (1977), for string orchestra and one bell

Interval

Britten
Saint Nicholas, Op. 42 (1947-8)

Britten-Pears Chamber Choir
Choir of Trinity College, Cambridge
Holst Singers
Britten Sinfonia
Boy soloists from Ely Cathedral Choir
Allan Clayton tenor
Sally Pryce harp
Stephen Layton conductor

Now read how music rose from the wreckage at Snape
Header photo shows choristers of Coventry Cathedral with Britten in rehearsal for his War Requiem in Ottobeuren Basilica, West Germany in 1964.
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Mahler beats Britten with finale knockout

In the first half we had Benjamin Britten's Violin Concerto, premiered in 1940 by Antonio Brosa and the New York Philharmonic conducted by John Barbirolli. The structure of the concerto is three movements with the final Passacaglia marked Andante Lento (un poco meno mosso). Its opponent in the second half was another 20th century masterpiece dating from 37 years earlier, Gustav Mahler's Symphony No 5 in C sharp minor, with its Rondo Finale marked Allegro - Allegro giocoso.

The venue for last night's contest was Britten's own magical Snape Maltings, and the orchestra was the BPO. Everywhere else in the world BPO stands for Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra, but Aldeburgh is a parallel musical universe where the BPO is the Britten Pears Orchestra, a crack orchestra of young professionals whose spontaneous music-making puts to shame the autopilot efforts of the big name bands. Yes, they do take risks, as the early horn entry in the attaca between the last two movements of the Mahler showed, but give me ten of those for one of the current autopilot performances by the BBC Symphony. Conductor was man to watch Paul Daniel who conjured up memories of Sir Adrian Boult with a crystal clear stick technique, feet kept firmly on the podium, and violins divided across the stage. The outstanding violin soloist in the fiendishly difficult, and exposed, Britten Concerto was Thomas Bowes whose task was made even more difficult as he took over the part as a last minute substitute for the indisposed Janine Jansen.

Britten was, of course, a great admirer of Mahler. He had received the score of the Ninth Symphony as a present from Peter Pears in 1938, and the Violin Concerto is clearly influenced by that great work, ending in a beautiful coda that struggles ambiguously between the desolation of D minor and the possibility of D major. An outstanding performance faded away last night, and the capacity Snape audience hesitated - had the work really finished, or was there another movement to follow to resolve the ambiguity? There were no such questions in the second half, the barnstorming Rondo Finale of the Mahler accelerated to the final bars leaving the audience in no doubt that this was the triumphant conclusion. The audiences responded with an ovation, and it was clear that Mahler had won with a knockout in the finale.

The status of these contrasting masterpieces from two of the 20th century's greatest composers mirrors the reaction of last night's audience. There are few recordings of the Britten in the catalogue (the finest of which remains the composer's own), and it is rarely heard in the concert hall. Searching Mahler 5 on Amazon returns 320 hits, and the work is a warhorse of the auto-pilot orchestras with the peripatetic Minnesota Orchestra riding it into town this summer for a BBC Prom. Why the difference in popularity?

Visconti's 1971 film Death in Venice was the PR dream come true for the Mahler. I still cannot hear the Adagietto without seeing a heavily made-up Dirk Bogarde, and to understand the film's inspiration just compare the photo here of Bogarde as Gustav von Ascenbach with the header image of Mahler. And talking of von Aschenbach the opening work of the 2007 Aldeburgh Festival is a new production of Britten's opera Death in Venice directed by Yoshi Oida with the Britten Pears Orchestra conducted by last night's conductor Paul Daniel. While the Mahler symphony was undoubtedly boosted by Visconti's dramatisation of Thomas Mann's novella, the Britten Violin Concerto is unpopular with today's autopilot soloists who find it difficult to learn and in little demand from the equally as autopilot concert planners.

But is there an additional explanation for the differing popularity of the two works in the form of their finales? Granted there are many examples of frequently played works with equivocal endings ranging from Maher's Ninth Symphony to the Rite of Spring and Gottedamerung. But these are outnumbered many times over by the popular works with rousing and uplifting conclusions, including Mahler's own First Symphony (have you ever heard a performance that didn't get a standing ovation?), Beethoven's Ninth and numerous other examples. So is there a lesson here for contemporary composers? - please your publisher and get more performances by writing a rousing finale.

* A timely reminder that December 4th 2006 is the thirtieth anniversary of the death of Benjamin Britten. The composer was a friend of admirer of Shostakovich, and it is an irony that this important musical anniversary looks likely to be overshadowed on the BBC and elsewhere by the current Shostakovich saturation. Britten was a great composer, conductor and pianist, a musical visionary, pacifist and humanitarian whose legacy not only survives, but grows with the work of the Britten Pears Foundation which embraces young performers and composers. Many of Britten's admirers, including me, will be attending a concert at Snape on December 2nd by the Britten Sinfonia and Britten Pears Chamber Choir. This will include Britten's 1948 can