Aldeburgh Music Festival 2017

The roof at the Britten Studio, Snape

The 2017 Aldeburgh Music Festival marks 70 years of the festival, and 50 years at the Maltings. How time flies. Roger Wright has been Executive Director since September 2015, and management has gone from strength to strength.  This year, there's no Artistic Director as such, though there's a team for Artistic Planning. Snape is now a thriving centre with grand plans.

This year's keynote opera is Britten's A Midsummers Night's Dream, keynote of the first season at Snape, which premiered at Aldeburgh's Jubilee Hall in 1960.  The staging will be directed and designed by Netia Jones, so look forward to an imaginative presentation.  Her staging of Oliver Knussen's Sendak operas, Where the Wild Things Are and Higgelty Piggelty Pop! were brilliant - read more about them HERE.  A Midsummer Night's Dream is magical, ideally suited to  transformation by lighting effects and video  illusion. This could well be the best Aldeburgh opera staging in years.    Soloists include Iestyn Davies, Sophie Bevan, and Matthew Rose.  Ryan Wigglesworth conducts. Tickets will disappear fast - Friends booking starts today, public booking on 7th February.  Don't wait.  On 22 June, there's a screening of the Hollywood film version with music by Erich Korngold, on which please read more HERE. 

La Voix Humaine (15th to 17th June), Poulenc's setting of Cocteau's monodrama, a tour de force for solo soprano, here performed by Claire Booth. Intriguingly, this will take place "in a private house near Snape", a suitably atmospheric setting, in a semi-staging by David Pountney. Another must! Again, please read more HERE.  Britten's "Vaudeville" The Golden Vanity, a morality tale about an outsider at sea, gets a rare outing on 17/6, heard with Britten's The Ballad of Little Musgrave and Lady Barnard  and other new shorts, performed by Camblata, young adult male voices of the National Youth Choir.

Countertenors and Benjamin Britten, who brought the voice type back into prominence. Andrew Watts features at this year's Festival, with Olga Neuwirth's Maudite soit la guerre, A Film Music War Requiem (UK premiere) with other Neuwirth pieces with the London Sinfonietta  on 10/6 followed by Hommage à Klaus Nommi, a "song cycle like no other – an anarchic, neon-lit encounter between Purcell, Weimar cabaret, bubblegum pop and The Wizard of Oz" and "A Countertenor Song Book" on 12/6 featuring works by Bach, Handel, Olga Neuwirth, Colin Matthews, Tippett, Torsten Rauch and Raymond Yiu.  More Neuwirth throughout this year's Festival, enjoy.

The City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra visits Aldeburgh again, this time with Mirga Gražinytė-Tyla in two conerts on 17th and 18th June - Beethoven 3, Stravinsky Petroushka, Tchaikovsky, Britten and Jorg Widmann. The man himself is playing clarinet (Mozart) with the Belcea Quartet on 10/6. Oliver Knussen's O Hotortogisu receives its world premiere on 23/6 with the Birmingham Contemporary Music Group, hopefully with Knussen himself at the baton, together with another new work by Harrison Birtwistle, Chorales from a Toy Shop, and pieces by Stravinsky and Jo Kondo.

Plenty of choral music this year, with Vox Luminis,  EXAUDI and others, including a programme with music by Nishrat Khan. The highlight could well be Vox Luminis Purcell King Arthur on 22/6.  As always, lots of baroque and early music, Lieder and piano music - Pierre-Laurent Aimard, Piotr Andrewski, Huw Watkins and others. The closing concert will be Britten Billy Budd, from Opera North, with Roderick Williams, Alan Oke and Brindley Sherratt.

Quicklink to the programme booklet HERE.

American Lulu - Edinburgh Festival

By Juliet Williams

Last Night's premiere in the closing days of the Edinburgh Festival of their new production American Lulu had much in common with last year's very enjoyable chamber series from Scottish Opera.

Austrian composer Olga Neuwirth  has adapted Alban Berg's opera to a period spanning the 1950s to the 1970s in the American South. The personal tragedy of the exploited but manipulative antiheroine is played out against a backdrop of the struggle for civil rights and racial equality. The action on stage is intercut with the playing of famous speeches of Martin Luther King, a timely commemoration of his 50th anniversary, and remaining pertinent as well as inspiring.

The plot elements contrast personal and collective aspects of freedom. This tale of mutual sexual exploitation still has power to shock, perhaps all the more so seen now from the perspective of a woman who has pursued a 'successful' career in high-class prostitution from the age of 12. Neuwirth has creatively re-orchestrated the first two acts to include electric guitar, electric piano and percussion and the music references jazz and blues, acting implictly as a voice of the oppressed black population. Her re-working of the first two acts follows the original libretto but goes on to a new ending which I actually much prefer. I prefer the more ambiguous ending (unsolved crime, many possible suspects and motives) than the Jack the Ripper scenario. This underscores, as a sub-plot element, the uneasy relationship between the black community and the police, the ending and the police commissioner scene playing off against each other in an interesting nuance.

A small cast performed a musically enjoyably and emotionally intense work using effective but never extravagant staging.  Angel Blue sings the title role. Jacqui Dankworth, cast well as Eleanor, the "Countess Geschwitz" character is stunning as a lesbian admirer and aspiring jazz singer. Paul Reeves multi-tasks as Professor/Banker/Commissioner with aplomb..The singing is uniformly good in the supporting parts, as is the orchestral playing but Paul Curievici, also good in last year's production Ghost Patrol, stands out as the Photographer.

This American  Lulu is co-produced by The Opera Group, (which supports the creation of new work) Bregenzer Festspiele, Scottish Opera and the Young Vic in association with the London Sinfonietta. It was co-commissioned by Komische Oper Berlin and The Opera Group. There is another performance in Edinburgh tonight, and the production then tours to thee Young Vic Theatre from 13-24 September (www.youngvic.org / 020 7922 2922). This interesting and creative production is well worth seeing.

Juliet heard American Lulu in Edinburgh. I'm going to the London performances at the Young Vic, where I heard Olga Neuwirth's Lost Highway in 2008. Neuwirth has a thing for completely reinterpreting ideas in new forms. Lost Highway wasn't "about" the David Lynch movie of the same name, butt a kind of afterlife recreation. American Lulu, I suspect, won't be Berg Mark 2 but something quite original. Watch tjhis space!