Happiness is ...

More on Stimmung here and Jordi Savall here.
Report broken links, missing images and errors to - overgrownpath at hotmail dot co dot uk

Is live classical music price elastic?

Amid all the debate about the benefits of free recorded music shouldn't we be asking if live music has the same price elasticity? Would cutting the cost of concert tickets attract new listeners and boost audiences?

One case study suggests it would. I have already written here about the success achieved by Aldeburgh Music in building audiences for adventurous repertoire. Aldeburgh has an established policy of half-price tickets for anyone under 27, no other qualification such as student status are required although Aldeburgh also runs its own student card.

Extending discounts beyond students is a smart move. Student concessions have an image of uncomfortable seats way up in the 'gods'. There are a lot of high disposable income under 27s who are not students and who haven't yet 'got' classical music. They buy designer brands, drive nice cars, and leverage price elasticity through websites such as Lastminute.com. They want decent seats at a concert, and if they like the experience they will return. They are from the other long tails I wrote about recently, and they are an untapped new market for live classical music.

The half-price concessions at the 2008 Aldeburgh Festival translate to £11 for a top seat for Yannis Kyriakides' new opera, and just £5 for either Stimmung or for the Faster Than Sound experimental music event. Judging by the attendances and age range at Snape it works, and Aldeburgh Music will be extending the scheme in the near future to strengthen their links with younger audiences.

Of course there is a cost in any price reduction. But a lot of money is being thrown at more fashionable and less effective schemes aimed at attracting younger audiences. These include advertising with 'attitude', e-cards, Second Life gigs, commissioning concertos for tap dancers and promoting music for babies, not to mention signing wunderkind.

I suspect the problem is that simple old-fashioned price reductions don't earn fees for the many advertising agencies, artists' agents, marketing consultants, digital production agencies and other middle-men who feed off classical music today. But if live music really is price elastic the simple solution may be the most effective.

Stimmung for a fiver is a no-brainer (which would have been my headline if it wasn't a no-no for the search engines). But now read about a Stockhausen concert where ticket prices were a problem.
Image credit is appropriately from The Future of Classical Music - BBC. 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

Stockhausen's Stimmung at summer Snape

A late night performance of Stimmung is one of the highlights of the 2008 Aldeburgh Summer Festival. It will be sung by London Voices as part of the Faster Than Sound experimental music festival within a festival. The evocative photo above was kindly provided by fellow blogger Richard Friedman. He took it at the October 1971 performance of Stimmung in the Théâtre de la Ville, Paris by the group that commissioned it, Collegium Vocale Köln. Richard is also a fellow webcaster, check out his Music From Other Minds on KALW 91.7 FM San Francisco. The footer photo was taken by me at the 2007 Faster Than Sound. Stockhausen's music is just one of many delights at the 2008 Aldeburgh Festival which runs from 13th to 29th June, here are some of the others:

* World premiere of a new opera An Ocean of Rain by Yannis Kyriakides directed by Cathie Boyd.
* Featured composer György Kurtág and his wife Marta in recital.
* Pierre-Laurent Aimard plays The Art of Fugue and conducts the Britten Sinfonia.
* Ensemble Organum sing Machaut.
* Steven Isserlis and Thomas Adès play music by Kurtág, Debussy, Janáček and a new work by Adès.
* I Fagiolini sing Byrd.
* Premiere of John Woolrich's Violin Concerto.

As I've said here before, contemporary music is flourishing in Aldeburgh. This is due to adventurous and challenging programming. And Aldeburgh is not frightened of controversy. They proudly feature the 2007 premiere of their multi-media opera Elephant and Castle on the front of their new brochure, in confident defiance of a one star Guardian review from a grumpy Andrew Clements. Here are the facts that prove music has to be an adventurous experience:

In the past twelve months Aldeburgh Music has:
* Presented more than 150 concerts and events, including music, opera, dance, visual arts, public masterclasses and talks.
* Sold 91,000 concert tickets.
* Involved 8000 people in 250 Aldeburgh Education project days.
* Nurtured musical talent from around the world through the Britten-Pears Young Artists Programme which has more than 300 alumni.
* Started building its visionary new music campus.
* Involved more than 200 established musicians in Aldeburgh Residencies.
* Coached 25 of the region's finest young musicians through the Aldeburgh Young Musicians scheme.

As Benjamin Britten said, music does not exist in a vacuum.


Header photo (c) Richard Friedman 2008, footer (c) On An Overgrown Path 2008. 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

Thomas Ades out - Pierre-Laurent Aimard in

Just received - a press release announcing that Pierre-Laurent Aimard (photo above) will succeed Thomas Adès as Artistic Director of the Aldeburgh Festival for three years with effect from 2009. As the Independent commented following his BBC Prom earlier this year: "At 50, the French pianist-conductor still has the eager simplicity that induced Messiaen to make him his protégé at 12, and the luminous brilliance that persuaded Boulez to install him at 19 as resident pianist for his brand-new Ensemble InterContemporain. . . .”

Pierre-Laurent Aimard explained: “It was a big surprise to receive Jonathan Reekie's proposal to become Artistic Director of the Aldeburgh Festival. It was only after long reflection that I realised it was the right and possibly natural progression for me in terms of musical challenge and engagement. I love the exploration of musical confrontations and the encounter with various creators and performing partners - embracing the literature of different eras and cultures in such a way as to let the pieces enlighten each other. So what a joy to share with audiences and colleagues music as a living and growing art form in the context of an annual festival rather than a one off event in time. How we can continue to expand on the inspired concept and spirit of the original Aldeburgh Festival will be a fascinating journey in which I hope that we can do justice to the richness and diversity of music today.”

Pierre-Laurent Aimard has an international reputation not only as a great performer but also as a programmer of real invention. He will give three performances at the 2008 Aldeburgh Festival: as soloist/director with the Britten Sinfonia on Saturday June 14th, in recital on Friday June 20th, and performing chamber music with Tabea Zimmermann and Martin Fröst on Sunday June 22nd. All three concerts will feature works by György Kurtág, composer in residence for the 2008 Aldeburgh Festival. Other international curatorial projects led by Pierre-Laurent which form a backdrop to his new role in Aldeburgh include artiste etoile at the Lucerne Festival (2007); Pianist in Residence at the Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra (2006-07); Domaine Privé at the Cité de la Musique (Spring 2008), Carte Blanche at the Vienna Konzerthaus (2006-07), his own Perspectives series for Carnegie Hall (2006-07); and Artistic Directorship of Southbank Centre’s 2008 Messiaen festival.

Jonathan Reekie, Chief Executive of Aldeburgh Music said: "After an inspirational ten years with Thomas Adès at the helm, in our search for a replacement we were looking for an outstanding, original musician and programmer, who would both respect the Aldeburgh traditions but also stamp their mark on the Festival. In Pierre-Laurent Aimard we have all those qualities, rare in one person - a brilliant performer with a flair for creating concerts and Festivals. His performances here have been the talk of recent Aldeburgh Festivals and we are very much looking forward to working with him."

The 2008 Aldeburgh Festival, Thomas Adès’ tenth festival as Artistic Director, opens on Friday 13th June with a new opera commissioned from Yannis Kyriakides. During the festival Adès will conduct BCMG (Sunday June 15th) and two days later, with Steven Isserlis, will give the premiere of work that he has written for Isserlis. Associate Director of the festival, composer John Woolrich, will remain in this role, working alongside Pierre-Laurent Aimard.

“Every distinguished artist who has been chosen to present a series of Perspectives concerts at Carnegie Hall has used the opportunity to make connections among music of different styles and eras. But no one has taken this kind of exploration to the exhilarating extremes of the brilliant French pianist Pierre-Laurent Aimard. . . . By mixing and matching short pieces or excerpts from longer ones (46 in all), he created, in effect, an original, evening-length, five-section patchwork composition that audaciously leapt across centuries, defying stylistic categories.” New York Times, May 14th 2007

Now read an exclusive interview with Jonathan Reekie
Photo credit Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center. 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

Simple Gifts on internet radio

My Future Radio programme at 5.00pm UK time on Sunday November 25 has an all American theme for the Thanksgiving Holiday, but with an East Anglian twist. Aaron Copland’s first set of Old American Songs was commissioned by Benjamin Britten and Peter Pears for the 1951 Aldeburgh Festival here in East Anglia. There are five songs in the set, and the fourth is the traditional Shaker tune Simple Gifts, and that melody appears in different guises in all the works in the programme. I am playing Susan Chilcott's performance of the Old American Songs accompanied pianist Iain Burnside. Tragically Susan Chilcott died of cancer at the age of 40 just a year after this recording was made.

Simple Gifts has appeared in many different versions over the years, including one by Wilson Picket. But for the central sequence of the programme I'm going back to the song in its original version. It is sung by the Shakers of Sabbathday Lake in Maine augmented by the Schola Cantorum, Boston in a sequence of five Shaker chants and spirituals. The recording I am playing is a real find, read about it here.

For the final music in the programme I turn to one of the most celebrated re-imaginings of Simple Gifts. Aaron Copland's ballet Appalachian Spring was commissioned by the Martha Graham Dance Company, and uses the Shaker melody in the scene where the newly-weds are blessed. The ballet was first performed in Washington DC in 1944, and my header photo is from the original production.

Listen by launching the Radeo internet player from the right side-bar, or direct from the audio stream at 5.00pm on Sunday November 25. Convert to local time zones here. My programme of Simple Gifts is dedicated to Maurice Béjart who died on November 22, 2007, aged 80.

Now read how Aaron Copland found 'tis the gift to be free.
No photo credit, just who owns Martha Graham? 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. 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

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

Roll over Benjamin Britten

London doesn't have a monopoly on Promenade concerts. My photograph shows the young audience bouncing to Konono No. 1 at last night's Snape Prom on the very floor where Benjamin Britten stood to record Bach's St John Passion. Every year the front rows of seats are taken out of Snape Maltings for Aldeburgh's own Proms season. It runs for the whole of August, and ranges from Paul Lewis playing Beethoven Sonatas to World Music.

Last night it was the vibrant Konono No. 1 from the Congolese capital Kinasha playing Congolese/Angolan trance music which really had the audience dancing - watch them live here on YouTube. The warm-up was the first ever DJ to play Snape Maltings although she clearly didn't know the spirit of the place. Introducing Konono No. 1, she said if so moved we should feel free to get on our feet and start shaking our things. Clearly she was unaware that Ben had already established such behaviour as an Aldeburgh tradition decades ago.

Aldeburgh Music's chief executive Jonathan Reekie has gone on record as saying the pigeon holes of old are dissolving. He is there somewhere to the right of my picture, bouncing in the mosh pit with the youngsters. Which is not something you see BBC Proms supremo Nicholas Kenyon doing in the Albert Hall.

If you can make it to Suffolk the Snape Proms run until August 31. Several of the concerts, including Jacques Loussier, are sold out, check the Aldeburgh Music website for availability. It's just the thing to bring new audiences to Snape, and as Britten said, music doesn't exist in a vacuum. A great time was had by all last night. But please don't give up the day job Aldeburgh.

Photograph 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

BBC Proms banish Bach to bedtime

Here are Pliable's personal picks for the coming week's BBC Proms. All Proms are available for seven days online, detailed programmes and broadcast times for every concert are available from the BBC web site.

* August 7, 7.00pm - Mahler Symphony No. 10 in Deryk Cooke's completion and Britten's Sinfonai da Requiem. Two superb works, but in one programme? Gianandrea Noseda and the BBC Philharmonic dispense the double dose of death. Noseda and the BBC don't quite seem to have got blogging. The latest entry in his 'Life of a Conductor' blog on the BBC Philharmonic site is for April 2007. If you want to find out about chocolate in Torino it is a rivetting read

* August 7, 10.00pm - it is really good to see Nicholas Kenyon using the late-night Proms slot for fringe repertoire. The choral music in this late-night Prom is all from that little known composer J.S. Bach, and the performers are Masaaki Suzuki and the Bach Collegium Japan. But let's count our blessings. The late-night Proms suffer less from the intrusive audience noises and disruptive inter-movement dribbles of applause that have sadly become a feature of the main concerts. When will a visiting conductor finally have the nerve to criticise the sacrosanct, and spoilt, Prommers? While Masaaki Suzuki plays Bach at bedtime the core repertoire in the main concert at 7.30pm the following day is John Dankworth and the BBC Concert Band. At least Aldeburgh got it right. Masaaki Suzuki conducted a life-affirming B minor Mass as the closing concert of the 2007 Aldeburgh Festival. While back in London all the Proms can offer is the cringe-inducing Last Night, which at least includes a token three minutes of music by Thomas Adès.

* August 10, 9pm - this not-quite-late-night Prom is exactly what the slot should be used for, with Nitin Sawhney bringing his cross-genre and cross-cultural music and a lot of friends. Check out his music here on YouTube.

* August 11, 6.30pm - one of the season's highlights is the young in mind Sir Colin Davis conducting the European Union Youth Orchestra in a programme ending with Sibelius' glorious Symphony No. 5. But why the 6.30pm start time for a Saturday evening concert? Could it be that the BBC2 live telecast has to fit in with the sacrosanct 9.00pm programme junction for BBC1 and 2 and their satellite channels?

* August 12, 4.00pm - the bright idea of a Proms Ring Cycle ends somewhat ambiguously with a 'pick-up' performance of Götterdämmerung. Donald Runnicles conducts the BBC Symphony Orchestra, Christine Brewer is Brünnhilde and Stig Andersen Siegfried. The BBC Symphony's Vaughan Williams Fifth Symphony on July 26 with Andrew Davis showed they can play gloriously with the right music and the right conductor. But if they didn't have time to prepare Sam Hayden's new 15 minute work for the July 17 Prom what chance Götterdämmerung?

There was some very interesting discussion here on the music that wasn't in Marin Alsop's American Prom on July 17. This Sunday, August 5th I will be playing Americans symphonies in my Overgrown Path radio programme. The featured works will will be William Howard Schuman Symphony No.5 (Symphony for Strings), Aaron Copland Short Symphony (No. 2), and Alan Hovhaness Symphony No. 2 "Mysterious Mountain".

The programme is a test transmission, and will be broadcast between 5.00pm and 6.00pm British Summer Time on Sunday August 15, and is available on web radio. Convert on-air times to your local time zone using this link. Click here for the audio stream. Windows Media Player doesn't like the 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 happen to be in the Norwich, UK area tune to 96.9FM. Details of future webcasts are here.

Now, for more whacky JSB try Bach and modern technology.
CD sleeve is Bach at Bedtime from Philips, and I aplogise for touching out the logo. 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 and Stravinsky - after the flood

Finally the rains have stopped, and summer has arrived in East Anglia. Photographs taken this morning as I cycled out of our village.

Benjamin Britten's wrote Noye's Fludde here in East Anglia, and it was first performed at the 1958 Aldeburgh Festival. It is Britten's most substantial work for children, and is based on one of the 16th century Chester Mystery Plays using an edition by Alfred W. Pollard. The main vocal parts are written for children, with the exceptions of the adult parts of Noye himself, Noye’s wife and the Voice of God. Noye's Fludde is scored for strings, recorders, bugles, handbells and a range of percussion, and also calls for home-made instruments including sandpaper blocks and slung mugs. Every CD collection should include the definitive 1961 recording made in Orford Church.

Igor Stravinsky wrote the musical play The Flood in California to a commission from CBS television. The libretto is a compilation of texts by Robert Craft from the Book of Genesis and the Chester Mystery Plays. The Flood, with choreography by Balanchine, was premiered in June 1962 as a CBS telecast, and received a hostile press reception. The composer's own recording, made in Hollywood in March 1962 for the telecast, is included in the newly released Works of Stravinsky, which also should be in every CD collection.


Now take the same path to Spring Symphony.
Photographs (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

In search of the lost chord

Email received yesterday from director Tim Hopkins, whose new multi-media opera I wrote about here:

Dear Pliable, Glad you enjoyed performances of Elephant and Castle (photo above), and thank you for taking the trouble to write about it. If you would like to see some more current work, there is an exhibition called Picture House curated by English Heritage at Belsay Hall near Newcastle. I have made an installation with sound and video, called The Lost Chord. There is also a performance piece but this is staged only occasionally, between now and September. The exhibition has work by many different artists - my bit is a small part of this.

With best wishes
Tim Hopkins, Clockwork Studios, London SE5

Now stay around Aldeburgh for Cold war - chilled music
Photograph copyright 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

Flying the BBC Proms flag

Hesse Lecture 2007 - Sorry you felt the need to speculatively review this in advance….how odd. As you've written a great deal of interest about the Proms in recent seasons I thought you might like to see the real thing. A shorter version will be in The Guardian tomorrow I believe - Nicholas Kenyon

This was the email sent to me yesterday by Nicholas Kenyon about my post on his 2007 Hesse Lecture, which he gave at the 2007 Aldeburgh Festival. Sure enough, a shorter version appears in today's Guardian. But there is no mention at all that the lecture was commissioned by, and given at, the Aldeburgh Festival. Instead the full page article gets the following sign-off:

Nicholas Kenyon is director of the BBC Proms, and becomes managing director of the Barbican Centre in October. The Proms: A New History is published by Thames and Hudson. BBC Proms runs between July 13 and September 8. Information and tickets: bbc.co.uk/proms or 020-7589 8212

Not only is Nicholas Kenyon director of the BBC Proms. He is also consultant editor of the book The Proms: A New History. How odd...

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

A ruthlessly market-driven broadcasting system

In today's Guardian Nicholas Kenyon speculatively reviews Saturday's Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment concert at the Royal Festival Hall. A couple of weeks ago I wrote about BBC Proms Director Kenyons' Hesse Lecture at the Aldeburgh Festival, and today I received this email:

Hesse Lecture 2007 - Sorry you felt the need to speculatively review this in advance….how odd. As you've written a great deal of interest about the Proms in recent seasons I thought you might like to see the real thing. A shorter version will be in The Guardian tomorrow I believe - Nicholas Kenyon

I'd hate to be thought odd. So here, scooping the Guardian, is the attachment:

Metropolitan, micropolitan, cosmopolitan: the BBC Proms, the Aldeburgh Festival, and the future - given in the Jubilee Hall on Tuesday 19 June 2007 during the 60th Aldeburgh Festival by Nicholas Kenyon.

It’s not given to everyone to invent a word, but you’ll notice that one of the three words in my title is invented. It was Kenneth Clark, I believe, who coined the neat word ‘micropolitan’ in one of the many lectures he gave here this hall, at Aldeburgh in 1951. Clark’s lecture was described thus: ‘A consideration of how much is gained and lost at certain periods by avoiding or ignoring the main centres of art, or working outside the current metropolitan tradition’. He was talking about art, not music, but what he said is actually a very acute characterisation of what the Aldeburgh Festival itself did musically in its early years after the war. That was to create a highly characterised ‘micropolitan’ musical culture centred around Benjamin Britten, in direct opposition to --and surely in tacit criticism of-- the prevailing metropolitan musical culture, which was then most powerfully represented by the Proms, under the emerging populist influence of Malcolm Sargent.

The current Aldeburgh Festival is the 60th, and it is 80 years since the Proms of Sir Henry Wood were taken on by the BBC in 1927; that provides one reason to look at the contrasts between these two musical undertakings, even though they may seem at first sight totally dissimilar in size and scope. Another is to ask whether both are challenged by the huge changes that now face all of us in classical music as we move into a third age of musical consumption and dissemination in which everything about the future seems up for grabs, a vast potential and opportunity in a sea of uncertainty. So I offer this Point Counterpoint partly to get us thinking about the role of performance, the choice of repertory and the history of changing taste in the musical world. If I’d like to leave you wondering about one thing at the end of this lecture, it is simply ‘how was my musical taste formed? Why do I like what I like? How it will be different in ten years’ time?’

The subject of performance history has for far too long been neglected by serious music historians as totally secondary to the history of composition. To take a very relevant example, the story of music in Britain after the war can, and has, been written as the unfolding sequence of new works by Britten after Peter Grimes, the emergence of Michael Tippett after A Child of Our Time, the more ambiguous place of William Walton, as they moved towards their great operatic undertakings of the 50s, the arrival of new works by Rawsthorne, Rubbra, Lutyens, Alan Bush, George Lloyd, whoever. But what was the reaction to these works when they were performed? When and where and why were they performed? Equally important to the musical story of the late 1940s are birth of the Edinburgh Festival, the formation of the Philharmonia and the Royal Philharmonic orchestras, the first of William Glock’s summer schools, also 60 years ago, at Bryanston and now at Dartington, the creation of the Arts Council, the popular success of the Proms as they transferred to the Royal Albert Hall, and the thirst for a Festival of Britain that led to the building of the (just triumphantly reopened) Royal Festival Hall. We still live, culturally, in the shadow of that enormously creative period. Peter Diamand of the Edinburgh Festival once expressed the spirit of those times as ‘a healing process’ after the war. But I think we can now see it more as a direct continuation and development of the flourishing of the arts on a truly democratic basis that occurred during the war, as a bright gleam through the years of Austerity Britain that the arts really could be for everyone.

In this picture the new Aldeburgh Festival played a decisive and indeed a prophetic part. Britten more than once referred to it as his most important undertaking. Yet there’s all too little written in the welter of Britten studies about his programming of the Festival, and the light it shines on his creativity. Paul Kildea’s innovative book Selling Britten is an important exception, but whereas he talks about the impact of the festival on Britten’s own music, I want to spread the net a little wider. There are some very revealing sidelights in the recent posthumous collection of Philip Brett’s superb writings, Music and Sexuality in Britten, which includes his Proms lecture of 1997, the Britten Era. But this is the exception rather than the rule.

The origins of every great undertaking become enshrined in myth, and those of the Aldeburgh Festival, like those of the Proms back in 1895, are no exception. Compare these two oft-reported dialogues. Eric Crozier about Aldeburgh in 1948: ‘there was something absurd about travelling so far [in Europe] to win success with British operas that Manchester, Edinburgh, and London would not support. ‘Why not’, said Peter Pears, ‘make our own Festival? A modest festival with a few concerts given by friends? Why not have an Aldeburgh Festival?’ Robert Newman of the Proms in the 1890s: ‘I have decided to run those Promenade Concerts I told you about last year…I want you [Henry Wood] to be the conductor of a permanent Queen’s Hall orchestra…I’ll see what can be done…for I mean to run those concerts.’ And Henry Wood, later: ‘They said there wasn’t a public for great music... But Robert Newman said we’d make a public, and we did.’

However mythological the actual reported speech, it is striking how the constructs, the specific characters of the two undertakings are firmly fixed in those few lines: for Aldeburgh the local idea, with ‘a few friends’, for the Proms the educational impulse and the wish to ‘make a public’. Yet in both cases the motivation was much more complex than this: the aim of the first Proms impresario Robert Newman was more to try and find something to do with the new Queen’s Hall in the summer when the society audience for London concerts was out of town. Hence the masterstroke of clearing the floor area of the Hall for a standing audience paying low prices, which immediately established the egalitarian, socially mixed nature of the Proms that has endured for a century and more.

The motivation was surely equally mixed at Aldeburgh: they may have talked cheerfully of a few concerts for friends, but what Britten actually wanted was control (in the best sense) over how his works were performed by the musicians he chose, in the circumstances he wanted, and how they were received by a sympathetic audience. The experience of collaborating with Glyndebourne on Lucretia had not been a happy one, and the later experience of Covent Garden and the Coronation opera Gloriana, a watershed in Britten’s attitude to the wider world, was to be another. Aldeburgh gave Britten remarkable security in that respect. As the subsequent history shows, ‘a few friends’ were not beyond being sacrificed by Britten to the primary needs of the work in hand, and the localness of the festival is at least open to question.

What was happening back in London? The Queen’s Hall had been bombed and the Proms had transferred, perhaps unwillingly but with enormous success, to the much larger Royal Albert Hall. After the war, and the death of Sir Henry Wood, the BBC acquired a newly proprietorial attitude to the concerts. The emergence of Malcolm Sargent as the darling of the public, fostered by the rise of television during the 1950s, turned the Last Night of the Proms into a TV event for millions. Alison Garnham in the newly published history of the Proms (The Proms: A New History, Thames and Hudson, edited by Jenny Doctor and David Wright) writes tellingly of the BBC’s post-war desire to re-brand the Proms as ‘the Possession of the Whole Nation’. The great symphonies and concertos came together in the programmes to support that allegiance to traditional values (even though that repertory had played far less dominant a role in the adventurous days of Henry Wood). Malcolm Sargent, with his well-known distaste of avant-garde repertory, solidified the belief that the Proms should annually repeat a basically unvarying diet of accepted masterpieces. It was clear that this was a change from Wood’s day: when Sargent told author and promoter Thomas Russell that ‘he no longer regarded it as a responsibility of this series of concerts to present new works’, Russell objected ‘if Sir Malcolm will forgive me, I must say that this discloses a complete failure to understand the meaning of the Proms in relation to our music today’.

So what lies, consciously or unconsciously, behind our planning? For Aldeburgh and in the early days of the Proms, frustratingly little written evidence survives of the planning process. Aldeburgh didn’t even say it had artistic directors, it originally had three ‘founders’ including Eric Crozier, then in 1955 at a time of considerable reorganisation, it had two artistic directors, the next year it had three with Imogen Holst, whose centenary we celebrate this year, which lasted until the beginning of Snape in 1967, then unwisely it had more, and in the hiatus after Britten’s death it had far too many. As an example of Britten’s ingratiating style with his musical friends, I came across a letter to Yehudi Menuhin, I think so far unpublished, from January 1958, when Menuhin was to come and play the year after the tragic death of Dennis Brain. Britten planned a new piece for four horns and strings in his memory; it didn’t get written in time (we’re performing the fragment he did write in the Proms this year on the 50th anniversary of Brain’s death). Instead Menuhin played the slow movement from the Schumann Violin Concerto. But what else was to be in the programme? Britten wrote: ‘I must say you are angelic to agree to all our wild suggestions about the Festival, and I am going to test your angelicness by making even further impossible suggestions…..I have been hunting for a triple concerto not by Bach with conspicuous lack of success except that I have discovered a beautiful A major concerto by Telemann.’ The idea of Britten at that point in his life researching Telemann triple concertos has a slightly surreal air to it. Britten’s approaches to people to include his own music were always charming: to Leon Goossens in 1957: ‘My dear Leon. Would you be interested to come and play at our Aldeburgh Festival next year? What we were thinking of was a chamber concert with you playing the Mozart Quartet, and perhaps my old Phantasy if you like the idea…’

I am sure we can agree that the role of the artistic director is to sense the taste of the times and push it imaginatively forward, as Henry Wood and William Glock did, as Britten, Pears and Imogen Holst did, venturing further out to sea, as Glock once put it, that their own personal preferences might take them. Glock is often portrayed as a manic modernist, but what his Proms were remarkable for, quite apart from the wealth of contemporary music, was the number of first performances at the Proms of classic repertory, the Mozart Requiem, Haydn Masses, Handel, Bach, Machaut and Rameau; and he always considered the need to attract an audience to the adventurous music he programmed: he put Schoenberg alongside Beethoven (and was thus able to claim that the Schoenberg Violin Concerto drew one of the largest audiences of the Proms season) or Elliott Carter alongside Bach.

In this he was following the principle pursued with enormous energy by Henry Wood, which was to embed among works the public would recognize and love new challenges in every season. So in the early years of the 20th century music by Debussy, Sibelius, Mahler, Musorgsky, Rachmaninov, Cesar Franck and many, many lesser figures were introduced to the Proms audience –some faded without trace, among which one has to mention Bruckner’s Seventh Symphony, a Wood innovation that he never repeated. Some became repertory pieces, like Debussy’s L’apres-midi or Rachmaninov’s First Piano Concerto. Some achieved notoriety, like Schoenberg’s Five Orchestral Pieces in 1912: when Wood was rehearsing that work he said to his players ‘Stick to it., this is nothing like you will have to play in 25 years time!’, and how true that turned out to be.

The difference now is that, dealing with a huge range of international orchestras and conductors, we perhaps plan more collaboratively than in the past. In his chapter in the new history of the Proms, Tom Service writes of the last decade as seeing ‘the creation of a new set of priorities for the Proms, a continuous move from a top-down model of programming and decision-making to a vision that resembled a network of connections …a move towards post-modern diffusion’. He writes that with what I read as a hint of criticism, but it exactly reflects what we want to achieve, because we the planners do not know everything, those we connect with have brilliant ideas, and in my view there is absolutely no virtue in forcing works on artists that they are unwilling to perform. The suiting of work to artist is crucial because the greatest performances result from the right marriage of performer, work and audience. I think Britten too had an acute sense of what musicians were good at performing, and suited his choices to them.

There are countless contrasts between the Proms and Aldeburgh. One is that between the highly characterful micropolitan spaces of Aldeburgh and the comparative metropolitan anonymity of London --though I would argue strongly that the arena of the Albert Hall with its extraordinary sense of community is as strong a space as any in which symphonic music is heard. I’ve said before how much I envy the ability of Aldeburgh to be very experimental in its smaller venues; in our vast space we can equally experiment with formats –our 1000 Years of Music in Day, the Millennium Youth Day or our more recent concerts with improvisational elements and young performers, while maintaining a strong commitment both to established repertory and rare works.

But one other fundamental contrast between the pre-BBC Proms and Aldeburgh that I want to think about is that when people first went to the Proms in 1895 live performance was the only way they heard music; they might perform it for themselves at home around the piano, and they went to concerts. That was it. By the time Aldeburgh started in 1948, broadcasting had become central to our lives and recording was just about to. In this, as in so much else, Benjamin Britten was absolutely a child of his time, as we see from the letters and diaries of the 1930s, a passionate consumer of the extraordinary range of live music that the radio made available to him. I’ll mention one example in a moment, but the point is that Aldeburgh, in assembling its very distinctive repertory, could assume that the music in the festival was not all the music that audiences heard. It took its place against the background of a wealth of broadcasting and recordings. Broadcasting didn’t remove the need for festivals, quite the reverse, one didn’t replace the other, any more than TV has replaced radio: the two co-existed and changed each other. Aldeburgh, as you see from the countless record company ads in the programmes over the years, was affected by and contributed to the recording industry: they didn’t stand in opposition. And festivals became a key part of the broadcast year, as Paddy Scannell has eloquently put it, the BBC created in its calendar of annual events, ‘punctual moments in a shared national life’.

The contrast of repertory between Aldeburgh and the Proms is extreme: before Britten’s death the Aldeburgh Festival did not include a single performance of any symphony by Beethoven or Brahms or Tchaikovsky or Sibelius, which were then the staple diet of Proms programmes. Of course this was partly due to the size of the Festival venues like the Jubilee Hall, but not entirely. Britten did do Schubert symphonies, and Mozart symphonies, because he wanted to, and when wanted to perform Mahler’s Fourth Symphony with the LSO in 1961, still in the pre-Snape years, he did so in Orford Church, which had always been there as a possible festival venue and had been used for Noye’s Fludde in 1958. But where had Britten heard Mahler’s Fourth Symphony? At the Proms in 1930, only the second time it had been done there. (It had actually been introduced to this country by Henry Wood at the Proms in 1905, a couple of years after he did Mahler’s First.) The young Benjamin Britten wrote in his diary in 1930: ‘much too long, but beautiful in parts’ and a later article mentions the ‘slack, under-rehearsed and rather apologetic performance’. But he went on: ‘After that concert I made every effort to hear Mahler’s music and I began a great crusade among my friends on behalf of my new God, I admit with only average success.’ With only a couple of live performances across several decades, it is no wonder that taste changed so slowly.

What then happened was that in the late 1930s, several recordings, including two really fine performances by Bruno Walter, of Das Lied von der Erde in 1936 and the Ninth Symphony in 1939, began to circulate and gained a circle of admirers including Britten, Donald Mitchell, Deryck Cooke, and the process of interest and acceptance started. When the BBC Third Programme started in 1946, one of the early major projects it undertook was to broadcast from November 1947 to March 1948 a complete cycle of Mahler symphonies, some from European orchestras, some on disc, and some new performances by the BBC Symphony Orchestra. Adrian Boult had conducted Mahler 4 again in the 1947 Proms. But Mahler 2, with its choral forces, had to wait until 1963 for a first Proms performance, the incandescent one by Leopold Stokowski that’s been released on BBC Legends. [I didn’t realise when I mentioned this performance that the soprano soloist on that occasion, Rae Woodland, was in the hall, and is now President of the Aldeburgh Music Club!] The first Proms performance of Mahler 5? 1968, conducted by Pierre Boulez. Now you just can’t keep them down, there would be three every season if conductors were given half a chance.

Aldeburgh always had what E. M. Forster in his famous account of the first festival called ‘something which is distinctive’, not as he said a festival which is ‘an excuse of overcharging’ and ‘remain at the flower-show level, the amateur-theatrical level, and my old enemy, the Morris Dance, once more comes forth and foots it defeatedly on the tussocks of the village green.’ There’s no greater tribute to the strength of character in the Aldeburgh Festival’s planning that as early as 1951 in the Programme Book, George Harewood could report the remark ‘It felt very like an Aldeburgh programme’. Of course there were programmes which felt a little random in their enthusiasms, of which my favourite, which made me laugh out loud in the hallowed walls of the Britten-Pears Library, has to be the one that started with a Boyce Symphony, continued with Schoenberg’s First Chamber Symphony, then Chausson’s Concerto for piano, violin and string quartet, Wagner’s Siegfried Idyll and –anyone like to guess or recall? –Saint-Saens’ The Carnival of the Animals. (Actually, thanks to Rosamund Strode’s impeccable pencilled notes in the programme books at Aldeburgh, I see they changed the order so the Wagner came last.)

So how at its best did Aldeburgh characterise itself? It did so by building around Britten’s works a collection of music which both illuminated and contextualised his work. There was music that had an influence on Britten: Purcell, who opened the first festival and was there every single year, with songs which were central to the joint recitals by Britten and Pears; Dowland songs, which Pears performed with Julian Bream; Mozart piano concertos that Britten himself performed long before some of them were fashionable, Bach cantatas, which created the Long Melford spin-off of Bach weekends; and the Schubert lieder in which Britten and Pears excelled. Then a whole range of early music arrived for live audiences at Aldeburgh at the same time as the Third Programme was beginning to uncover it for radio listeners. The first ever complete Bach St Matthew Passion sung in German in this country came from Holland in 1950, thanks to Peter Pears having sung there. George Malcolm and then Britten directed Monteverdi’s Il Combattimento di Tancredi e Clorinda in 1951 –astonishing!-- in a double bill with Purcell’s Dido and Aeneas. Peter Pears sang the Evangelist in the Passion settings by Bach’s great predecessor Heinrich Schutz.

Following the arrival of Imogen Holst after working with Britten on Gloriana, and then as an artistic director in the mid-1950s, the revival of early music at Aldeburgh gathered momentum: in every annual festival there would be a series of five or six themed concerts (which the BBC Transcription Service promoted). There would be Venetian music 1500-1750, Flemish Music 1430-1630, English church music from the 15th to the 20th centuries, Magnificats every late night in the parish church, acres of amazing rediscovered repertory. These revivals, made possible by the first published editions of those works, now appear epoch-making in the emerging story of the early music movement in this country. (So I think Paul Griffiths is not quite right to say in his interesting survey of the festival in this year’s programme book that ‘early music was strongly represented, but not the early music movement’ –what Imogen Holst did, in those years, was the early music movement.)

This assertion of difference, as Philip Brett has shown both in his writings both on early music and on Britten, was crucial to the motivation of the whole early music movement. And it was critical to Britten as a composer, in his frequent rejection of conventional performing forces and formats in his own works. And I am sure it was critical to the programming of the festival. In Britten’s case I think it might be worth someone unpicking that there were three different repertories --a composing repertory, those who affected his music; a conducting and playing repertory, those he liked to perform; and a festival repertory, those he was broad minded enough to include in Aldeburgh programmes as long as he didn’t have to perform them or in some cases to listen to them either.

As I’ve said, there is too little evidence of the way of both the Aldeburgh Festival and the Proms were planned. But there is one revealing interview I thought we might listen to a little of. In a 1960 BBC programme, Britten talked about planning the Festival with Lord Harewood, just before the opening of A Midsummer Night’s Dream: HAREWOOD/BRITTEN Transcribed in Britten on Music, edited Paul Kildea pp. 176-7

Now there’s quite a lot that could be unpacked there, and that final reference to Stravinsky is extremely disingenuous: he really didn’t form part of the musical world-picture at all in Britten’s lifetime, and when The Rite of Spring was eventually allowed into the festival in 1974 (!) it was in a student performance in an afternoon concert at Snape, when the main evening concert was David Munr0w and the Early Music Consort! That balance has happily been strongly redressed in the Oliver Knussen and Thomas Ades years. But go back to the 17th-century composers Britten mentions, Schutz and Monteverdi. They were enthusiasms shared with Peter Pears, and there could surely be no greater proof of how Aldeburgh correctly sensed the temper of the times, how prescient they were, and how they affected changing taste, then that precisely those two composers became the flagships of the most significant new ensembles in the wider popular early music revival at the beginning of the 1960s. In 1962 Roger Norrington formed his Schutz Choir, with Peter Pears as it were validating that new undertaking by singing the Evangelist in all the Schutz Passions in London; then John Eliot Gardiner launched his Monteverdi Choir, with the historic Monteverdi Vespers performance in King’s College Cambridge in 1964. The rest is history…

As the work is performed in this year’s festival, it’s worth recalling that the Aldeburgh Festival was the place where you could hear movements from the Monteverdi Vespers in the early 1950s. The complete edition of Monteverdi’s works had not been completed by Malipiero until 1942, and there was no practical edition of the Vespers until 1949, and that wasn’t very practical. Walter Goehr mounted his pioneering performances and made his new edition, followed by Denis Stevens and others. The relation between available published editions and performance is another critical factor –in his very interesting article on the English madrigal, Peter Pears identifies the succession of published volumes by Edmund Fellowes as the markers along the road to reviving that repertory. Just because music is on library shelves it does not mean it will be performed, but it is a crucial factor in helping it to happen. And works slowly but surely become standard repertory: those Handel oratorios that Aldeburgh championed, Jepththa, Saul, L’Allegro --we can’t get enough of them today. So the micropolitan culture, highly characterised and distinctive, begins to affect the mainstream metropolitan undertakings, and even the Proms begin to include Schutz and Monteverdi alongside Carter and Boulez.

There are two issues around Aldeburgh’s programming which are a little trickier: one is localness. I think it’s fascinating how carefully Britten articulated this aspect in that Harewood interview. ‘There are enough people who like the things that we like’; he refers to the character and size of buildings and the specific nature of the locality and his personal friends, rather than anything much to do with the local audience. In his famous Aspen Award speech he said ‘I belong home, there, in Aldeburgh. I have tried to bring music to it in the shape of our local Festival, and all the music I write comes from it. I believe in roots, in associations, in backgrounds, in personal relationships… I write music now in Aldeburgh for people living there and further afield, indeed for anyone who cares to play it or listen to it.’ Again that’s very deftly put –the roots and associations are to do with his, Britten’s relationship to the place, which clearly does have such a critical influence on his work, and in the suiting of works to available buildings. But the tastes or needs of a genuinely local audience never really played a part in the founders’ very personal enthusiasms. Theirs I guess was more the contemporary philosophy: ‘build it and they will come’.

As indeed they did in their thousands once Snape was converted in 1967 and then rebuilt after the disastrous fire. But the sense of place was thereby transformed, and while writers like Paul Driver have written very eloquently of the exquisite special character of Snape, the fact remains that since 1967, for 40 out of the 60 years of festival history, you have if you so wished been able to attend events in the Aldeburgh Festival without coming into Aldeburgh at all. That makes a real difference, and I think it was a tacit recognition of that fact that the famous Ronald Blythe Aldeburgh Anthology of 1972, published to support the development of Snape, goes to enormous lengths to reassert the local connections of the Festival and make the links with the culture of the region stronger than ever, because there was a real danger that in the new world they might slip away and become less important.

That was a moment of great danger for the festival, I think, that in expanding it might lose touch with its roots –but somehow the Snape fire, which reasserted the make-the-best-of-it spirit on a truly heroic scale, causing the need to cram Idomeneo onto an improvised stage in Blythburgh, reminded the festival of its real roots, the challenge of cramming A Midsummer Night’s Dream into the Jubilee Hall in 1960, Ossian Ellis staying up all night before the premiere to write the two harp parts into one because there just wasn’t room for two harps. Indeed it was through the classic Aldeburgh formulation of ‘a few friends’, that the festival renewed itself, through Britten’s musical partnerships with Richter, Rostropovich and Shostakovich, and embracing Tchaikovsky, always perhaps surprisingly close to Britten’s heart. In fact the Festival flourished post-Snape. What it almost didn’t survive was the death of its founder.

The second tricky issue is the record with contemporary music, and this is also quite difficult to interpret --once you have accepted that the mainspring of the whole undertaking was the ideal performance of Britten’s own music, you have to question how far non-Britten contemporary music was central to the festival, until it became so quite a while after his death. In the early years there was innocuous new music by friends and colleagues like Arthur Oldham, Martin Shaw. Yes, there was the whole continuing tradition of the English Opera Group, then English Music Theatre: Lennox Berkeley, Malcolm Williamson, Nick Maw. Yes there were the visits by distinguished colleagues, Poulenc and Kodaly. The Society for the Promotion of New Music was allowed (albeit in a morning concert in the Jubilee Hall) to present small-scale music from the younger avant-garde generation, in 1957 Richard Rodney Bennett, Susan Bradshaw, Cornelius Cardew, and three years later Hugh Wood, Maxwell Davies and Harry Birtwistle before any of them had Proms commissions. But I’m not sure how central it was, and as we know Britten drew the line at Harrison Birtwistle’s Punch and Judy. (Whether he actually walked out of the premiere is debateable, but he clearly rejected the piece and criticised its lack of links to operatic tradition.) For all his generosity to younger composers, Britten felt increasingly uncomfortable with some of the directions music was taking.

Let’s not be over-critical here, for one thing that Aldeburgh and the Proms of the 1950s had in common with almost every other area of British musical life (William Glock’s Dartington Summer School the honourable exception) is that neither provided any platform for the continental avant-garde. There was nothing here in Aldeburgh, save the famous and not repeated 1954 concert of musique concrete, which actually seems to have arisen from a friendship with the French cultural attaché of the time. This was not untypical: remember that when the BBC eventually and with enormous reluctance broadcast a concert of Henze, Berio and others in 1956, the music department memo said that it had been decided that ‘on reflection to broadcast a few of their better works would not undermine our reputation for acute critical assessment.’

Colin Matthews wrote in the preface to Rosamund Strode’s invaluable Music of Forty Festivals –time for an index of Sixty Festivals now!-- ‘The extraordinary diversity revealed speaks for itself, and as strongly in the music of the present century as elsewhere…The programmes were not restricted to those composers towards whom the artistic directors were themselves sympathetic’ Strictly speaking that’s true, there was of course smaller-scale music by Beethoven or Brahms, for instance, in many festival chamber music concerts. But I would say the programmes were the stronger and more characterful, and the festival the more coherent, the more they were restricted to the directors’ tastes. The really amazing thing you get from Rosamund’s list is that among the works listed under A the first named composer is Johannes Acourt flourished 1400, (who he? Ed), then Agricola, Richard Allwood of the Mulliner Book, Angelus ad virginem from the 14th century, English 15th century motets, Italian 15th-16th century music… It is strange how balanced and consistent in certain respects the central composers of the Aldeburgh Festival turn out to be: not allowing for repeat performances, in the first forty festivals there were about 132 works by Britten, 136 by Bach, and 136 by Mozart, 112 by Purcell, 138 by Schubert. I don’t know