Live the dream at Snape Maltings

Fancy a duplex in the middle of beautiful countryside, yet across the road from one of the world's finest concert halls? Well fancy no more. You can live the dream at Snape Maltings.

I have already written about the inspirational new creative campus at Snape that builds on the artistic vision of Benjamin Britten and Peter Pears. As part of this redevelopment some of the redundant Maltings buildings are being converted into residential properties. In my header visual the concert hall is on the left, the new creative campus in the center, and the new properties are on the right. Below are two visualisations of the properties.


The first eighteen properties went on sale off plan late last year. As I write just three are still available. They are all two bedroom duplexes. The cheapest is £425,000 (US$875,000), the most expensive is £550,000 (US$1.13million). This is for a property with one parking space and a six mile drive to the nearest shops and railway station. Jet set conductors and other wealthy readers can find more details of the properties here.


Now playing - Benjamin Britten's The Building of the House op. 79 with Simon Rattle conducting the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra. The 1967 Aldeburgh Festival opened with a visit from Queen Elizabeth and a concert in the new Snape Maltings Concert Hall which included this overture, composed to celebrate the ‘building of the house’. The music is as lively as the wonderful acoustics in which it was first performed. The version performed in 1967 was for chorus and used an English text of Psalm 127 adapted by Imogen Holst, but there are alternative versions which omit the chorus.

Now read how about the rebuilding of the house.
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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

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.
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In Memoriam - Alan Blyth

If you are a keen record collector the chances are that sleeve notes by Alan Blyth (left) will be on a number of your recordings. He wrote for many of the UK's leading newspapers, appeared regularly on BBC radio, was assistant editor at Opera magazine and a longtime contributor to The Gramophone, and published many books including Remembering Britten. He was music critic at The Listener for three years, and used this platform to criticise the programmes of the then BBC Controller of Music, William Glock and Pierre Boulez. His last set of sleeve notes will appear posthumously on the re-issue of the 1959 recording of Handel's Acis and Galatea with Joan Sutherland and Peter Pears.

Alan Blyth died on August 14 2007. Follow this path to The Times obituary.

Photo credit The Gramophone. 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

Music and the spirit of place

Nicholas Kenyon has been Director of the BBC Proms from 1996 to 2007, he takes over as managing director of the Barbican Centre arts complex in October, and today delivers the Hesse Lecture at the 2007 Aldeburgh Festival. His subject is 'changing tastes and changing programmes over 60 Aldeburgh Festivals and 80 years of BBC Proms, the story of the post-war Festival movement, and the unprecedented changes that now challenge all aspects of classical music.'

Although tastes and programmes have changed, Aldeburgh remains a great international music festival. It is still personal, distinctive and inclusive, and those are the very characteristics that defined the seasons of the great Proms directors such as William Glock and John Drummond. Aldeburgh eschews fads and composer anniversaries, and instead challenges with the best new music. Aldeburgh ignores the touring brand-name orchestras with their jet-set maestros and tired war-horse programmes, and instead commissions innovative work such as Yoshi Oida's acclaimed production of Death in Venice, and the multi-media Elephant and Castle. And in Thomas Adès, Aldeburgh has an artistic director who refuses to trade in spin, who is internationally recognised as an artistic visionary, composer and performer, and who is a man of culture.

By contrast, at the BBC Proms Nicholas Kenyon has presided over a festival that has become increasingly anonymous, bland, and exclusive. In a July 2006 Guardian interview Kenyon listed the following among his achievements as Proms director - big screen TVs in Hyde Park, text-message information service, digital television relays, avoiding positive discrimination in favour of women composers (think about it), lots of guest orchestras from Europe and the US, and 'taking people with us'.

In his 1960 essay Landscape and Character Lawrence Durrell wrote 'the determinant of any culture is after all - the spirit of place.' This spirit of place in hugely important in music, and we find it in Bach's Leipzig chorales, Haydn's London Symphonies, the works of the Second Viennese, Manchester and Darmstadt Schools, and elsewhere. Aldeburgh has a very powerful spirit of place, and it has nothing to do with Suffolk fishermen and windswept beaches. It is about passion for new music, passion for inclusiveness, and passion for the visual arts, architecture and new media.

The BBC Proms no longer have a spirit of place. You can experience them at home on the radio, around the world via the internet, or anywhere, anytime - in a park near you. The Proms no longer offer a personal vision, instead they present the 'cookie cutter' programmes of the touring orchestras. The Proms are no longer a music festival, they are a global entertainment brand that stands for audience friendly and risk averse programming.

When you stand in front of Snape Maltings you see the place shown in the photo above. But you also feel the spirit of music from the Renaissance to the contemporary, of the visual arts from Barbara Hepworth to the latest video installations, and of culture from Benjamin Britten and Peter Pears, through Mitslav Rostropovich to Thomas Adès, Mira Calix and Tansy Davies.

I hope Nicholas Kenyon feels that spirit today.

Image credit Arts Council. 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

Is this new music's Woodstock?

In 1971 the pacifists Benjamin Britten and Peter Pears purchased the Chapel House in Horham, Suffolk because the noise from US fighters flying from the RAF Bentwaters base near Aldeburgh was disturbing Britten's composing. It was in Horham he wrote his late works, Death in Venice, Phaedra and the Third String Quartet. Britten died in 1976, and RAF Bentwaters closed in 1993 at the end of the Cold War, after 43 years with a US presence on the base.


Now, in an inspiring example of 'we have overcome', Britten's Aldeburgh Festival, under the direction of Thomas Adès, is reclaiming RAF Bentwater, and on Saturday the former Cold War base joins Snape Maltings, the Jubillee Hall, and Orford Church as a festival venue. On June 9th the disused military facility hosts 'Faster Than Sound', a six hour sound event which joins the dots between music genres and digital art forms. During the evening artists from a wide range of backgrounds are collaborating and exploring the worlds of electronic music, contemporary classical practice and interactive visual arts.

There will be a range of immersive installations, musical collaborations, a wireless walk in the woods, illuminated cold war military buildings and a large dome filled with contemporary music - all the photos here were taken before the 2006 event. Sonic Arts Network are performing works by Luigi Nono, Iannis Xenakis, and Luc Ferrari, and other performers include Mira Calix and Tansy Davies. More details on the Faster Than Sound website.


On Saturday afternoon we are at Orford Church, where Britten's Curlew River was first performed and recorded by the composer, for a concert by the adventurous Exaudi. Their programme is Gesualdo, a UK premiere by Salvatore Sciarrino, Niccolo Castiglioni, Monteverdi, Giacinto Scelsi, and Luigi Nono. Then, together with many others, we will travel the short distance from the historic church to the Cold War base of RAF Bentwaters for an evening of experimental music. Update - see the 2007 event via this link.

Faster Than Sound has all the excitement of those wonderful 1970s London Roundhouse concerts when Pierre Boulez and William Glock ruled at the BBC, and Classic FM was still two decades away. Could this be new music's Woodstock? Even if it isn't, the 2007 Aldeburgh Festival lays to rest all that nonsense about classical music being dead.


For a photo report on the 2007 Faster Than Sound follow this link, and get into the Woodstock spirit with Benjamin Britten - we shall overcome.
Photos of 2006 Faster Than Sound from FM Buckeymedia. 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

Elgar - the first of the new

Elgar was the first of the new. Since Purcell, England had not produced a composer for the European common market. Against -much against- the background of academicians who were destined to remain dilettanti, there emerged a self-taught amateur destined to become a master.

At the time of Elgar's birth Brahms was 24, Dvorák was 16, and Wagner 44. When he died, Vaughan Williams was 62, Walton was 32, Britten was 20 and Schoenberg 60. Elgar's musical fathers were far away; many, almost all of them were of the Austo-German tradition, with Brahms, rather than Wagner, as the most powerful influence; and none of them English.

In a penetrating article in the current issue of Music and Letters Donald Mitchell goes so far as to submit 'that to find Elgar today specifically English in flavour is to expose oneself as the victim of a type of collective hallucination.' Elgar's early success on the Continent, and with Continentals, was indeed striking. It needed a Continental - Hans Richter - to introduce the Enigma Variations, The Dream of Gerontius and the first Symphony (dedicated to him) to English audiences, and Düsseldorf heard Gerontius before London.

Hans Keller writes in Music and Musicians in June 1957, and contradicts the currently fashionable view that Elgar was not appreciated outside England.

Now playing ...

The Dream of Gerontius conducted by Benjamin Britten. The decision of the 'East Anglican' Britten (left) to record Elgar's Gerontius, with its hardline Catholic text by Cardinal Newman, was a surprising one. As a young music student Britten recorded in his diary in February 1931 that he listened on the radio to '1 minute of Elgar Symphony 2 but can stand no more,' and a few months later he condemned the Enigma Variations for their 'sonorous orchestration' which 'cloys very soon'. But in his sleeve note for the original LP release the composer William Alwyn described Newman's text as a 'Passion Play', and this may have appealed to Britten the composer of church parables.

Britten conducted an Aldeburgh Festival performance of Gerontius on June 9 1971, and the recording was made in the same month in Snape Maltings. William Mann described the concert performance as 'urgent, unsentimental and totally lacking in bombast', and Alan Blyth described the original LP release as 'a searing re-creation of the drama that I find at all times involving and convincing...Britten removes the veneer of sentimentality, even sanctimoniousness, that has for long come between us and Elgar's compulsive vision.'

The 1971 recording made by Decca, with the 'dream' cast including Peter Pears (left) and the Choir of King's College, Cambridge, is one of the classics of the gramophone. In the section that leads up to the life affirming chorus Praise to the Holiest in the height Britten shows his masterly control of the large forces, and the pre-digital sound is outstanding both for the lower registers and the three dimensional sound-stage captured by the Decca recording team. Elgar was a master composer, and Britten a master musician, this Dream of Gerontius is now back in the catalogue, buy it before it is again deleted.

Inclusiveness is out of fashion in classical music today, which means if contemporary music is your scene late-romantics like Elgar are the musical equivalent of dead meat. Next month we will be at Yoshi Oida's new production of Death in Venice in Snape Maltings. We should all remember that Britten recorded Elgar's great late-romantic masterpiece, Gerontius, in July 1971 in Snape Maltings while he was composing one of the great twentieth-century operas, Death in Venice, for performance in the same venue.

I started by quoting Hans Keller's view that Elgar was 'the first of the new'. We should also remember that Keller (left) championed Britten's music from the 1940s when it was still viewed as 'new' by the establishment. He was joint author of a Britten symposium in 1952, and the composer's 1975 String Quartet No. 3, with its last movement quote from Death in Venice, is inscribed to him. Britten died on December 7 1976, and his String Quartet No. 3 was given its first performance by the Amadeus Quartet two weeks later in Snape Maltings.

Benjamin Britten and Hans Keller recognised the greatness of Elgar's music. They also recognised the importance of inclusiveness, and embraced composers from Purcell to their twentieth-century contemporaries. Two very important messages as the 150th of Elgar's birth on Saturday June 2 approaches.

The music of Britain, and Britten ...

Hans Keller's headline, the first of the new, is a wordplay on the title of a patriotic 1942 film that Elgar would have approved of. The First of the Few was a biography of R.J. Mitchell (left), the designer of the Supermarine Spitfire (the film was renamed Spitfire for US release). The title comes from Winston Churchill who used these words to describe the Battle of Britain aircrews: "Never in the face of human conflict has so much been owed by so many to so few." And this overgrown path leads us to another great twentieth-century English composer; the soundtrack of The First of the Few, including the famous Spitfire Prelude and Fugue, was written by William Walton.

Contemporary music was as bitchy in the early twentieth-century as it is today. Elgar was not a fan of Walton's music, and said about Walton's Viola Concerto that the composer had murdered the poor unfortunate instrument. Elgar and Walton only met once, according to Lady Walton it was in the lavatory at a Worcester Three Choirs Festival concert. After the Second World War Walton fell out with Britten and Pears, and supposedly said that the all-male Billy Budd should be retitled The Bugger’s Opera or Twilight of the Sods (original production shot above).

Another late-twentieth-century composer who was a surprising champion of Elgar was Michael Tippett whose overseas concerts often included Elgar's music. In his autobiography (Hutchinson ISBN 009175307) Tippett describes a "stunning" Enigma Variations in Brussels with him conducting his beloved Leicester School Symphony Orchestra, and tells how 'afterwards a Belgian composer came to me and said, "What an extraordinary work - more interesting than Brahms' St Anthony Variations!"', and Tippett describes another Enigma played by the Saint Louis Symphony in 1968 under his baton as "one of the best performances (of the work) in the USA I guess". Tippett (left) was inclusiveness personified and embraced everything from Tallis (he made the first-ever recording of Spem in alium in 1948) through Elgar to the blues. But he also shared some of Walton's reservations about Billy Budd. Tippett stayed at Britten's house in Aldeburgh while the opera was being composed and told the story of 'a marvellous remark in the libretto - I think it got changed - when they were going to clear the decks in order to let off the gun, and the wonderful order, given by Claggart or somebody, "Clear the decks of seamen" I roared with laughter!'

Walton may have been irreverent about Billy Budd, but when the chips were down he came to Britten's aid. In 1942, the same year as The First of the Few was made, Walton appeared as a supporting witness at Britten's successful appeal for registration as a Conscientous Objectors. Britten's pacifism, like Tippett's, was controversial, but if his appeal had failed Britten could well have joined young composers such as Ivor Gurney and George Butterworth whose careers had been cut short by the previous World War, and who were lamented in the elegiac 1919 Cello Concerto of Edward Elgar. Which is where this path started.

For more on Elgar read the excruciating boredom of pure fact.
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Holiday weekend - upstate New York

Benjamin Britten, Aaron Copland and Peter Pears in upstate New York during the summer of 1939. Peter Pears (right) is obviously thinking 'tis the gift to be free.
Photo from Humphrey Carpenter's excellent 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

Benjamin Britten's women

Ask any opera buff who sung the roles of Quint and Miles in the first performance of Benjamin Britten’s Turn of the Screw in Venice in 1954, and they will have no problem answering Peter Pears and David Hemmings. But ask them who took the pivotal role of the Governess and they will probably struggle for the answer.

Glyndebourne Opera’s new touring production of The Turn of the Screw left me musing on the conundrum of gender in Britten’s operas. So often the male leads in today's Britten productions seem to be singing someone else’s role. It is hardly surprising, as we are familiar with the original casts through the astonishingly good recordings made with the composer himself conducting, and Pears, Hemmings and other artists singing the roles Britten wrote for them. But although the women in these recordings often reflect the first performance casting, posterity hasn’t been so kind to the sopranos.

The Governess at the Teatro La Fenice in 1954 was Jennifer Vyvyan, and she is seen in my header photograph trying to connect with Quint, sung of course by Pears. Britten also created the roles of Lady Rich in Gloriana, Tytania in A Midsummer Night’s Dream, and Mrs Julian in Owen Wingrave for Jennifer Vyvyan. So it was quite remarkable that in Glyndebourne’s new Turn of the Screw the startling new soprano Kate Royal (who I wrote about back in July 2005) made the female lead her own, and scored a real home run for gender equality with a performance which put the Governess firmly at the center of the plot. Watch out for Kate Royal (above), she is a real star in the making.

The gender bias in Britten’s operas is reflected in their critical treatment, with the male roles consistently in the spotlight. Following the premiere of Turn of the Screw Antoine Golea wrote in L’Express of Britten’s ‘intense preoccupation with homosexual love and the futility of struggling against it’, while predictably Virgil Thomson in the New York Herald Tribune described David Hemmings as ‘adorable all round’.

This bias does Britten an injustice as he wrote superb roles for his ‘house’ sopranos. As well as Jennifer Vyvyan, the British singer Joan Cross had roles created for her, including Mrs Grose in The Turn of the Screw, Female Chorus in The Rape of Lucretia, Lady Billows in Albert Herring, and Elizabeth lst in Gloriana (below). Unfortunately she retired before Britten committed the operas to disc, the exception being a 1955 mono Turn of the Screw. Cross had a close working relationship with Britten, lived in Aldeburgh after her 1955 retirement, and is buried in same churchyard in the town as Britten and Pears. Britten also worked closely with women who were not singers. In 1952 Imogen Holst, daughter of the composer Gustav Holst, joined the staff at Aldeburgh to work on Gloriana, and she was an artistic director of the Aldeburgh Festival from 1956 to 1977, and continued to live in Aldeburgh until her death in 1984. A portrait of her by Mary Potter hangs in the Snape foyer.

John Bridcut’s recent book Britten’s Children has justifiably enjoyed considerable success. Perhaps someone will now recognise the brave new world of gender equality by writing Britten’s Women?

* To keep things equal the other members of the excellent cast for Glyndebourne’s Turn of the Screw were Daniel Norman as Prologue/Peter Quint, Joanna Songi as Flora, Christopher Sladdin as Miles, Anne-Marie Owens as Mrs Grose, and Rachel Cobb as Miss Jessel. The conductor of a fine musical evening was Edward Gardner, and the director of a production that could have turned a little less was Jonathan Kent.

For more on gender bias take An Overgrown Path to BBC Proms 2006 lacks the eternal feminine
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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

Now men will go content with what we spoiled

Dateline Sunday 30 July 2006 - Hazardous material bound for Israel is believed to have been landed at RAF Mildenhall in Suffolk, after flights were diverted from Prestwick airport in Scotland in the wake of planned protests. A member of staff at RAF Mildenhall told the Press Association that one plane operated by US cargo firm Atlas Air was on the runway - but they could not say what was inside it. Atlas Air is being used for two hazardous material flights from Texas to Tel Aviv, and planes were due to fly into Prestwick over the weekend - but they were diverted to a military base elsewhere in the UK, according to a source at Preswtick.

An official operations spokesman at RAF Mildenhall, which has one of the biggest runways in Europe, later refused to confirm or deny the hazardous material flights had been diverted from Prestwick to Mildenhall. It is not sure exactly what is on board the planes, but their dangerous contents needed a special exemption from the Civil Aviation Authority, which was approved.

Two chartered A310 Airbuses carrying bunker-busting bombs for Israel previously stopped over for refuelling at Prestwick, apparently without following proper procedure. It led to calls for US planes to be banned from using the UK as a staging post for arms transport during the conflict between Israel and Hezbollah in Lebanon - although the government has made clear it was the breach in protocol rather than the fact of the flights that was at issue.

US president George Bush apologised to Tony Blair over the previous use of Prestwick to refuel planes carrying bombs to Israel.Tony Blair defended allowing the use of Prestwick for US aircraft ferrying bombs to Israel.Speaking on an official visit to San Francisco he told Sky News last night: "What happens at Prestwick airport is not going to determine whether we get a ceasefire in the Lebanon."

From the Eastern Daily Press. RAF Mildenhall is 35 miles from Aldeburgh, and 30 miles from where I write these words.

The pity of war, the pity war distilled
Now men will go content with what we spoiled
Wilfrid Owen's words used in Britten's War Requiem

The heading photograph shows the aftermath of the German bombing raid on Coventry in 1940 which destroyed the 14th century cathedral. Benjamin Britten's War Requiem was composed for the reconsecration of the cathedral in 1962. Britten (left) intended that the soloists for the premiere in the cathedral should be a Russian, Galina Vishnevskaya, a Britain, Peter Pears, and a German Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau, but the Russian authorities blocked the participation of Vishnevskya, and her place was taken, at short notice, by Heather Harper. For Britten's peerless recording of the work made in the following year Vishnevska joined Pears and Fischer-Dieskau. Britten and Pears purchased the Chapel House in Horham, Suffolk in 1971 because the noise from US fighters flying from the RAF Bentwaters base near Aldeburgh was disturbing Britten's composing. Ironically Horham is ten miles closer to RAF Mildenhall, and it was in Horham he wrote his late works, Death in Venice, Phaedra and the Third String Quartet. Britten died in 1976, and RAF Bentwaters closed in 1993 after 43 years with a US presence on the base.

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
If you enjoyed this post take An Overgrown Path to Dresden Requiem for eleven young victims and I am a camera - Britten's Aldeburgh

Benjamin Brittten's relationship with children

From early in life, Britten had close relationships with handsome teenagers. On his side, there was often a sexual attraction. The boys themselves were sometimes unaware, sometimes complicit. Ronan Magill, the last such figure in Britten's life, wasn't conscious of the charge in their relationship at the time, but says now: 'If he did [feel attraction], then I'm glad that he did - if I could make him think that way for even five seconds.'

When it comes to the question of how far attraction was physically expressed, Bridcut sometimes leans on the evidence. In 1936, Britten invited Harry Morris, 13, on a family holiday in Cornwall (Britten's brother and sister and their families were also present). According to Morris, Britten came into his room one night and made what he understood to be a sexual approach. The boy screamed and hit his host with a chair, attracting the attention of Britten's sister, Beth. Harry returned to London in the morning.

With Pears installed as a sort of combined spouse and chaperone, favourites were welcomed but limits were set. The chosen boys tended to be more or loss posh, and both sensitive and sporty. For Britten, the essence of boyish beauty was movement, which was why he made Tadzio in Death in Venice a dancing role. (See photo above). Parents were usually grateful rather than suspicious (Ronald Duncan willingly made over part of the parenting of his son, Roger, and forwarded his school report).

Innocence and sensuality seemed to co-exist in Britten, as they do in children, but an adult's innocence must always be held to account. He was lucky. There was gossip, but never quite scandal, though in himself, by virtue of being an artist with an obsessive outdoor streak, Britten combined the two arch stereotypes of the corrupting homosexual - the aesthete and the scoutmaster. Bridcut mentions a day of composition, rehearsals and performance into which he managed to cram four swims.

To describe an aspect of Britten's relationship with children, Bridcut uses the term 'paedocratic', not a word that will widely catch on, perhaps. Britten liked children to be in charge. The freer they were, the better he liked it. He never talked down to children and, in sports, never lost by choice.

From today's Observer review by Adam Mars-Jones of John Bridcut's new book Britten's Children. A brave, and highly commendable, piece of publishing by Faber. It tells, for the first time, the full story of Britten’s love affair in the 1930s with the 18-year-old German Wulff Scherchen, son of the conductor Hermann Scherchen. As Paul Hoggart of The Times commented, ‘this type of love belonged to an emotional landscape that has vanished for ever, and we are the poorer for it’. Follow this link for Richard Morrison's perceptive Times article on the TV documentary from which John Bridcut's book is a spin-off.

Now playing - Britten's Holiday Diary and the music for one and two pianos. A wonderful anthology of Britten's piano music composed and revised between 1923 and 1969. Played by Stephen Hough and Ronan O'Hara on EMI Classics 567492. The cover painting is by the English artist Henry Scott Tuke who worked in Falmouth in Cornwall between 1885, his work in this style made him a pioneer of gay art.

Image credit - Benjamin Britten's Death in Venice, Opera Company of Philadelphia production from Stevenrickards.com, Britten from Britten-Pear 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
If you enjoyed this post take An Overgrown Path to I am a camera - Britten's Aldeburgh

I am a camera - Britten's Aldeburgh

Brilliant weather here today with astonishing light, so no words, just pictures. All photos taken this afternoon (23rd March) in Aldeburgh and Snape using a Casio EX-Z120, and (c) On An Overgrown Path.
Other Aldeburgh resources on An Overgrown Path include * Music will rise from the wreckage * Easter at Aldeburgh * A direct line to Britten * East Anglia 1953 - New Orleans 2005 *

Music will rise from the wreckage.....

Steel works, Snape Maltings fire: mixed media by Cavendish Morton linked from Island Arts

It was a dark night, but as we came over the brow of the hill the sky was lit up by an orange glow, with a trial of thick smoke. If this was dramatic, seen from close to it was positively theatrical. Above our heads the black shell of the Maltings loomed like the flank of a stricken liner..... In the foreground, silhouetted against the bright lights, members of the English Opera Group chorus were collapsing into each other's arms. It was a devastating event, of course, but one whose aftermath - the triumphant rescue of the Idomeneo premiere at Blythburgh, and the Maltings rebuilding for the very next Festival - swiftly became part of the Aldeburgh legend.

In 1965 the expanding Aldeburgh Festival urgently needed a purpose built concert hall. After much searching Benjamin Britten and Peter Pears found a disused maltings at Snape on the River Alde four miles upstream from Aldeburgh. Architects Arup Associates were commissioned to oversee the conversion of the old agricultural building into a state of the art auditorium. The new hall was opened by Her Majesty The Queen in June 1967 (photo right) to universal acclaim, both for its outstanding acoustics and sympathetic conversion.

The opening concert of the 1969 season was an afternoon performance of Schubert's Trout by Britten and the Amadeus Quartet. During the evening fire broke out beneath the stage and quickly spread to the whole hall, resulting in the conflagration described above by an eyewitness, the pianist and accompanist Roger Vignoles. (The quote is from Autograph Books excellent Time & Concord - Aldeburgh Festival Recollections). The fire completely destroyed the roof, stage, seating, and flooring. All that remained of the main building were the structural walls which were damaged but still standing. (The photo to the right shows Britten and Pears standing in the wreckage). As serious as the structural damage was the artistic loss was even greater. Two of the precious instruments used in the Trout were burnt beyond recognition - Britten's own Steinway concert grand, and cellist Adrian Beer's priceless Grancino double-bass. Adrain Beer heart-wrenchingly describes how all he found were "some ashes and metal parts of that lovely instrument." Also totally lost were the costumes for the new production of Idomeneo that was to be premiered by Britten's English Opera Group in the Maltings three days later.

Through superhuman efforts by Britten, Pears and the Festival committee, Idomeno was transferred to a hastily constructed stage in Blythburgh Church. Costumes were borrowed from the London opera houses, and the premiere went ahead to critical acclaim. Of the other eighteen performances in the 1969 Festival only one was lost, the others all took place in alternative venues.

As if all that work was not enough, on the day following the devastating fire Britten and Pears started planning the rebuilding of the gutted Maltings. Miraculously this herculean task was completed for the first concert of the following season. On 2nd June 1970 the Queen returned to re-open the Maltings (and reportedly said she hoped not to be invited back for a third time). The rebuilt hall that rose phoenix-like from the wreckage proved to have acoustics identical to the original. (In fact some claimed the acoustics of the rebuilt auditorium were superior as Britten had authorised subtle changes).

That three week long 1970 season included three performances in the rebuilt hall of Idomeneo. There were also two performaces of a new production of Britten's opera The Rape of Lucretia,