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

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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Britten's reed-fringed path

'Snape is a straggling village just off the road to Aldeburgh. The River Alde, broad and marshy in its lower reach, becomes a small stream above the sluice at Snape Bridge. In 1938 the Garrett family was still operating the big Maltings by the old bridge, and lorries, barges and railway goods wagons came and went. Britten's Mill stood about half a mile north of this activity, in Snape village proper, but in a few minutes he could be walking on the reed-fringed path that wound past the Maltings towards Iken Marshes, with only the wildlife of the estuary for company' - from Benjamin Britten, A Biography by Humphrey Carpenter.

The photo was taken on Monday (Dec 3) from the reed-fringed path through Iken Marshes that Britten used to walk. The viewpoint is a mile downstream from Snape, the white speck on the horizon in the centre is the roof of the Maltings concert hall.
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Britten's sea interludes via webcam

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

Check out the multi-media clips while on the Aldeburgh Music website. And more images of Aldeburgh here.
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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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Aldeburgh has always been about the new

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

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

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

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

BS - How is Aldeburgh Music funded?

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

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

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


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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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


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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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


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

New music - the same difference

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

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

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

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

Do read Geoffrey Burgon's letter, there is an alternative to new music in safe doses.
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Aldeburgh sea interludes

* The photo above was taken before the very fine Aldeburgh Festival concert by Exaudi in Orford Church last weekend. It may be deepest rural Suffolk, but the concert received a glowing review in the New York Times, and is being broadcast on BBC Radio 3's Early Music Show on September 9th. As well as Gesualdo the concert includes a UK premiere by Salvatore Sciarrino, and works by Niccolo Castiglioni, Monteverdi, Giacinto Scelsi, and Luigi Nono. Don't miss it.

* Nuria Schoenberg Nono, widow of the composer Luigi Nono and daughter of Arnold Schoenberg, gave a moving introduction to a performance of her husband's 'Hay que caminar' soñando' for two solo violins yesterday in the Jubilee Hall. Madame Schoenberg Nono was also pretty impressive with her laptop. Her use of PowerPoint in her talk would have put most record industry chief executives to shame.

* The critical acclaim for Yoshi Oida's new production of Death in Venice at Snape is all the more remarkable when you remember that the Maltings has neither proscenium arch nor scenery flies. Britten insisted on the interior space of the hall being kept uncluttered to provide the best acoustics. He succeeded triumphantly, the reverberation time of the hall is two seconds when filled to its 800 seat capacity. This reverberation is the same as many modern concert halls with twice the audience capacity.

* Praise is due for the Aldeburgh Festival programme, or that should really read book. The 292 page full colour book, edited by Jane Bellingham, has articles from a range of authors including Paul Griffiths and Colin Matthews. The lavish £9 volume is worth getting hold of, even if you didn't attend the Festival. How many programme books can you say that about?

* The new Death in Venice was stunning, both musically (especially Alan Oke's Aschenbach and Paul Daniel's conducting) and visually. The crab and samphire salad in the Snape Maltings restaurant after the performance was also stunning. Samphire is a delicacy found here in East Anglia. The Maltings restaurant sums up the whole Aldeburgh Festival. It serves wonderful local fresh food at reasonable prices. It has the best view of any restaurant in the world across the marshes to Iken Church. And it employs a lot of local young people. The young lady who served us last night was a second-year archeology student from Southampton University. The restaurant also does a very nice Chardonnay.

* Yesterday was one of those days that can only happen at the Aldeburgh Festival. In the morning there was the amuse bouche of Nono's 'Hay que caminar' soñando', followed by a picnic lunch. Picnics at Aldeburgh have not yet become the ostentatious style statements seen at Glyndebourne, and my picture below shows the only meal I have ever eaten on a Cold War airbase. Following our picnic the afternoon brought a truly memorable double-header. At 2.00pm it was Luchino Visconti's film of Death in Venice in the sold-out Aldeburgh Cinema. It finished at 4.15pm, and there was then a fifteen minute drive to Snape for the 5.00pm start of the new production of Benjamin Britten's Death in Venice, which was also sold-out.

* You can't get more beautiful that two Deaths in Venice in one afternoon. But what happens when beauty grows old? Björn Andrésen became a gay poster boy when he was cast as Tadzio by Visconti in his 1971 film. After that role he lived in Japan, where he appeared in a number of television commercials and also recorded two pop songs. Andrésen now lives with his wife and daughter in Stockholm, and performs regularly with the Sven Erics dance band.


That's just the first few days of the 2007 Aldeburgh Festival, stay tuned for more Aldeburgh sea interludes.
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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.
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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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How long is long enough?

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

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

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


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

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

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


Now talking of sacred music, read about L'Orgue Mystique
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Classical music flowers in springtime Britain

Academy of Ancient Music, Chief Executive - £na
The Conservatoire, Director of Music - £32k
Scottish Ballet, Head of Development - £32 - 38k
Music at Oxford, General Manager - £na
London Symphony Orchestra, Head of LSO Discovery - £38 - 43k
Britten Sinfonia, Marketing Director - £na
London Sinfonietta, Development & Marketing Managers - £na

It's a beautiful spring day here, and the header photo was taken five minutes ago in our garden. On BBC Radio 3 this afternoon was a stunning performance by Martyn Brabbins and the BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra of that British masterpiece, Elgar's Symphony No 2 in E flat major. Today's Media Guardian lists the music vacancies above. Last Saturday we heard the Pergolesi Stabat Mater and Rachmaninov Vespers in Norwich Cathedral. On Friday it's Prokofiev and Stravinsky at Snape, and on Saturday Schütz and Pärt in Blythburgh Church.

But it's all a mirage. Read here about the death of live classical music, and here about the death of the recording industry.
Any copyrighted material on these pages is included for "fair use", for the purpose of study, review or critical analysis only, and will be removed at the request of copyright owner(s). Report broken links, missing images and other errors to - overgrownpath at hotmail dot co dot uk

Britten celebrated with new music campus

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


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


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


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


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


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

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

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

Britten shows how everybody can make music

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

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

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

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

Programme for Snape Maltings Concert Hall, December 2nd 2006

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

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

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

Interval

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

Britten-Pears Chamber Choir
Choir of Trinity College, Cambridge
Holst Singers