European Commission - Culture - Magazine - Aldeburgh's European Connections

Aldeburgh's European Connections

by Henrietta Bredin

The Aldeburgh Festival, founded by Benjamin Britten and Peter Pears in 1948, has something quintessentially English about it, with its uniquely beautiful setting in huge 19th-century barley malthouses amid rustling reed beds on the Suffolk coast. From the very beginning, however, it has had strong European links.

The idea behind it, as Jonathan Reekie, Aldeburgh Music's chief executive, explains, was to provide a home base for the English Opera Group. This group was founded by Britten in 1947 to present his own work and that of other, mostly British, composers. They found it extremely difficult to cover their costs and: 'They may have been called the English Opera Group but all their gigs were on the Continent. I think they were on their way back from the Lucerne Festival when Britten said "Look, this is ridiculous. Why don't we start a festival in Aldeburgh?'

Isabel Charisius And that is exactly what happened. Britten and Pears decided to start by putting on concerts involving some of their friends and those friends came not just from Britain but from mainland Europe and beyond. 'There was always a mixture,' says Reekie, 'it always had that old and new feel to it. There were musicians who were already well-known and then people who at the time nobody had heard of, like the singer Elisabeth Söderström. And later, when they set up the Britten-Pears Young Artists programme, in 1972, that always drew on musicians from all over Europe, as well as from North America and Canada. At the moment, for example, on the teaching side, from Germany we've got , who used to be the viola player in the Alban Berg Quartet and who gives regular masterclasses for viola and quartet courses, and Marcus Daunert, who's the leader of the Leipzig Gewandhaus orchestra and the main string tutor for our orchestra here.'

From this year, the Aldeburgh Festival has a new artistic director, the Lyon-born pianist and conductor, Pierre-Laurent Aimard. He has his musical roots in Pierre Boulez's pioneering and radical Ensemble InterContemporain, of which he was a founding member, becoming their resident pianist at only 20 years of age. Jonathan Reekie is delighted to have him on board: 'Having had the composer Thomas Adès as artistic director for 10 years I knew it wasn't going to be possible to find a successor in exactly the same mould. So may aim was to find a really original thinker, a serious musician who's already a part of the Aldeburgh family. This is such a special place, with such a strong identity, that I thought it couldn't be someone who doesn't know it, who hasn't been here. One of the fascinating things about Pierre-Laurent is that I can't quite understand why he never became a composer because he's a musician who thinks about music in the way that a composer thinks about music. He's also a very good programmer and he does extraordinary, completely unique things like the Collage-Montage event he's put together for this year's Festival. He's taken lots of different music, movements from all sorts of things, composers from Beethoven to Schubert to Ligeti, and made it into a sort of musical patchwork. But it doesn't feel fragmented - it's a continuum and it's completely fascinating.'

For the past three or four years there has been a flourishing exchange programme between Aldeburgh and the Festival d'Aix-en-Provence, featuring members of their respective young artists' programmes. 'That came about,' says Reekie, 'because Aix and Aldeburgh are two of the longest-standing festivals to have a programme for young artists at the core of their activities. So we just thought it would be fun, every year, to swap something. This summer they're sending us the Minetti Quartet and we're sending them the tenor Allan Clayton with a programme of Britten songs. And we're now looking at the possibility of creating a European network of young artists' programmes, to create informal links so that musicians from one part of the network can easily find out about opportunities in other parts.'

This sort of flexible networking is comparatively easy to initiate. Opera productions are on an altogether more cumbersome and complex scale but Aldeburgh has had great success via its collaborations with the Bregenz Festival in Austria. Reekie acknowledges the wide-ranging effects of that partnership: 'For our production of Death in Venice, it was just us and Bregenz to begin with then, shortly before we opened in Aldeburgh, Prague came on board, then Lyon. Next year we're taking it to Toronto. We took Harrison Birtwistle's The Io Passion to Bregenz in 2004 and this year we've got Birtwistle's The Corridor and Semper Dowland, semper dolens. And The Cricket Recovers by composer Richard Ayres, based on children's stories by the Dutch writer Toon Tellegen, went as well. It's a fantastic way of increasing the exposure for new work and reaching a much wider audience.'

Back at home in Aldeburgh, the enterprising Jerwood Opera Writing Programme is under the direction of Italian composer Giorgio Battistelli and has attracted composers and writers including Raminta Serksnyte and Marius Baranauskas from Lithuania and Marketa Dvorakova and Miroslav Srnka from the Czech Republic. Language is no barrier here. Indeed, Battistelli's most well-known and frequently performed work is Experimentum Mundi, in which narrated passages from Diderot's Encyclopédie ou Dictionnaire Raisonné des Arts et des Métiers (translated into whatever language is appropriate for the country in which it is being performed) are woven about and accompanied by the orchestrated sounds of artisans at work, hammering barrels, forging metal hoops, cracking eggs into piles of flour to make fresh pasta. It's a fitting reflection of the blend of human activity and basic hard work that goes into making music, in Suffolk or the Vorarlberg.