On An Overgrown Path

When did you last experience a true performance? Not one of those musically perfect but soulless concerts by a celebrity maestro and a touring orchestra - Edinburgh yesterday and Salzburg tomorrow - that is more restatement than performance. I mean a real performance, a one-off where routine is traded for risk, where the musicians become players in a drama, an event which, to paraphrae Carl Nielsen , gives us something else, gives us something new, instead of expressing deedless admiration for the conventional. Canadian composer, educator and sound ecologist R. Murray Schafer declared that art should be dangerous , and he would surely approve of last night's Earthquake Mass at the Aldeburgh Festival . Antoine Brumel's Missa Et ecce terrae motus is known as the Earthquake Mass because it is based on the Easter Plainchant from Matthew 28:2: 'And all at once there was a violent earthquake'. Its innovative twelve part writing makes the Earthquake Mass one of the ...

Swamped by the final echoes of the Britten centenary celebrations was the news that the chief executive of Aldeburgh Music for the past sixteen years Jonathan Reekie is leaving in March. Over the years On An Overgrown Path has enthused about many of the projects that Jonathan has headed, and the photo above was taken when I interviewed him for a 2007 post . Although Jonathan's highest profile project was this year's Britten centenary culminating in Grimes on the Beach - "a triumph against the odds" - his most lasting legacy will be the new performance spaces at Snape which he masterminded. These new spaces, with the Britten Studio as the jewel in the crown , exhibit an acoustic excellence and environmental sensitivity which Benjamin Britten would most definitely have approved of. New music has been passionately promoted by Jonathan, with the highlights including the Faster than Sound presentations at RAF Bentwater and in the Britten Studio , Chris Watson...

In a celebrated 2011 April Fools' post I exclusively broke the news that the centenary of Benjamin Britten's birth in 2013 would be marked by a cycle of the composer's operas given in staged productions at Olympic venues - a cycle culminating in a gala performance of Peter Grimes at Lee Valley White Water Centre. Which should be read in conjunction with the recent non-April Fools' news that the culmination of the 2013 Britten celebrations will be three staged performances of Peter Grimes  on Aldeburgh beach - seen in my header photo. All I can say to Aldeburgh's Jonathan Reekie is he should  bewaret of that white water . Also on Facebook and Twitter . Photo is (c) On An Overgrown Path 2012. Report broken links, missing images and errors to - overgrownpath at hotmail dot co dot uk

An article in the Telegraph questions whether Pierre-Laurent Aimard is the right man to run the Aldeburgh Festival . Michael White's thrust that we should "leave running English music festivals to English music-lovers" is plainly wrong, but the underlying question as to whether all is well at Aldeburgh is valid. Regular readers will know Snape Maltings is my local hall . I spend more time there than in any other venue and have written more about music at Aldeburgh than any subject over the last seven years. My experience is that truly exciting and innovative things are happening at Aldeburgh; but increasingly they are happening outside the Festival period. Over the last twelve months three of my most intense musical experiences have been at Snape, the Aldeburgh Young Musicians performance of Louis Andriessen's Workers Union , John Cage's Song Books with Exaudi (see photo above), and the Suffolk Youth Orchestra's interpretation of Rachmaninov's Second Sym...

The ethos of the whole exercise is that every work of art is an individual achievement. Achievement develops self-esteem. Self-esteem is a vital ingredient of rehabilitation and the ability to lead a useful and law-abiding life. Therefore, because they are a means to that vital end, which amounts to protecting the public, the arts are, or should be, a compulsory ingredient in the programmes available in every prison. Armed with new skills and burgeoning self-esteem, offenders may go on to engage with the work, education or training that are essential for successful rehabilitation. I was therefore delighted when, in 2002, I learned that Aldeburgh had embarked on a most imaginative venture, involving the boys of Carlford Unit at the nearby Her Majesty's Prison and Young Offenders Institute Warren Hill and the children of Debenham High School under the guidance of Phillipa Reive . Those who came to the Aldeburgh Festival that year may remember the remarkable video made by the two gr...

Harrison Birtwistle dominates the 2009 Aldeburgh Festival. The two week festival in June includes no less than four performances of a double bill of newly commissioned music theatre pieces from Birtwistle. These fully-staged world premieres will be the first festival performances in the new 340 seater Britten studio , which is at the centre of Snape's new creative campus . Aldeburgh has long and close connections with Harrison Birtwistle's unique style of music theatre, and his controversial Punch and Judy was premiered at the festival back in 1968. Four decades later Aldeburgh is presenting the world premieres of Birtwistle's Semper Dowland, semper dolens theatre of melancholy, and The Corridor a scena for soprano, tenor and six instruments. Ryan Wigglesworth conducts the London Sinfonietta with Elizabeth Atherton soprano and Mark Padmore tenor. Poet David Harsent provides the libretto for The Corridor and the two works are directed by Peter Gill. As well as four per...

Unsurprisingly, I listened to more Bach than anything else in 2008. Raphaël Imbert's Bach/Coltrane CD for the Zig-Zag Territoires label captivated me, and judging by the emails it generated, it captivated many readers as well. Linn Records' one-to-a-part eight voice recording of the 1742 final performing edition of Bach's Matthew Passion was a new release, and it was, for me, one of the best new recordings of the year. An article about it waits in the upload queue, delayed by the sheer volume of wonderful music I have heard in the year. Also missing from my posts was the extraordinary Alpha Productions CD of parodies and transcriptions of music by Bach for organ and violin, played by Raphaël Oleg and Vincent Dubois. An endlessly fascinating disc that is also a wonderful example of the art of the balance engineer. A very welcome female interloper in a predominantly male profession, engineer Aline Blondiau achieves the impossible and produces a demonstration quality bal...

Oh, the sheer elegance of synchronicity! Two recent posts here touched on musicians as literary figures and John Adams' views on Britten's settings of English texts . The next book after Hallelujah Junction in the pile collected last week from the estimable Norfolk Library Service was Between Each Breath by Adam Thorpe . I had been greatly impressed by Thorpe's latest novel , but knew little about Between Each Breath . I picked it up today and read these words in the Acknowledgements : With many thanks to John Woolrich and Jonathan Reekie of the Aldeburgh Festival of Music and the Arts, where I was writer-in-residence in 2004, and where the germ of this novel was first sown. And these on the dust-jacket blurb: Once 'England's most promising young composer' - now living comfortably in Hampstead with his wife Milly, an heiress - Jack Middleton is no longer so young, nor has he fulfilled his remarkable promise. Between Each Breath is a rich and often hilariou...

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 differ...

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 emer...

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...

"Orchestral music is quite marginalised but I don't think that all pop music is evil or that pop equals cultural ignorance and orchestral doesn't. The pigeonholes of old are beginning to dissolve and musicians are working with other artists and barriers are breaking down. But it doesn't mean that everything has to be crossover; there's also a place for what you might call pure classical music." Jonathan Reekie (photo above), Chief Executive of the Aldeburgh Festival tells it like it is in The Independent in 2005, and puts his money where his mouth is with a triumphant 2007 Festival that featured everything from William Byrd to the electronica of Faster Than Sound and Elephant and Castle , and ended this afternoon with some pure classical music in the form of a life-affirming B minor Mass with Masaaki Suzuki conducting the Britten-Pears Baroque Orchestra and singers from the Britten-Pears Young Artist Programme . Barriers are certainly being broken dow...

Put Guardian critic Andrew Clements in a plush upholstered seat in a concert hall to listen to Shostakovich or Mahler's parodies of popular tunes, and chances are he will wax lyrical in his review. Ask him to walk around outside Snape Maltings and experience a multi-media and amplified opera which includes, horror of horrors, a Beatles tribute band, and he will grumpily find it 'in a word, dreadful.' Fortunately I don't earn my living in London churning out reviews of unamplified Mahler and Shostakovich in twentieth-century concert halls, so here are my pictures, and impressions, of Aldeburgh Festival's new commission, Elephant and Castle . Opera is the original multi-media art form, and it all started with Monteverdi's Orfeo in 1607. The proscenium arch single location format using natural acoustics has been the status quo for four-hundred years. Isn't it time to at least challenge that status quo ? Director Tim Hopkins sets out his position clearly: ...

"There was a Royal Academy exhibition in 1997 about the architect Denys Lasdun . As I recall, there was a photograph of him in wartime on the beach at Normandy wearing battledress, teaching architecture to the army education corps. I thought that was an amazing gesture of hope for the future. I began to think of buildings as hopes, as frail human endeavours, as children that need to be brought up, invested in and looked after. It's also an idea of the architect as hero, as distinct from architect as villain. Lots of things unravelled from that: where did it all go wrong, where did it all go right... My endowment from the National Endowment for Science, Technology and the Arts (NESTA) concerned exploring connections between the historic ambition of opera to combine human expressive arts, and the possibility of contemporary technology. A starting point was to enhance a use of moving image within opera performance. The arrival of digital technology proposes a new box of tools in...