Music
Oh, to be in Aldeburgh . .
Robin Holloway
In spite of the tiniest touch of ingrowing self-congratulation, Aldeburgh remains not only the most individual but also the most interesting British festival. For this, its 50th year, retrospection would be wholly justi- fied; but, true to the spirit and practice of Britten, new balances old. Moreover, from his own copious bottom drawer of rejects and incompletions comes, 65 years after its composition, a substantial premiere from the master himself.
Absolutely new is the festival's opening event, a theatre double-bill by Mark Anthony Tumage. The first half, based upon the harrowing real-life story of an abused wife who murdered her man, has passed through several vicissitudes to emerge finally as a song-cycle (command- ingly rendered by Sally Burgess) to music whose lush idiom and sophisticated scoring exaggerates rather than bridges the dis- crepancy between drastic circumstances and comfy art-work in a way that might be called exploitative.
Queasiness was banished by the other half, a real opera, small in duration, large in impact. Clare Venables has fashioned from a famous H.G. Wells parable, The Country of the Blind, a telling scenario; design, direction, lighting were startlingly effective. Reservations concern only the genre itself. The situation of the one-eyed man, whose eager hopes for easy domi- nance gradually collapse into impotent fatuity, is realised so fully in gesture and music that words seem superfluous. This feeling is reinforced by the relative conven- tionality of Tumage's vocal writing as against his instrumental (an excellent ensemble under Nicholas Kok) where the growing mastery of texture, colour, harmo- ny, voicing, pacing — most so in slow lyri- cism, less so in tension and excitement compels the ear as the action the eye. One seemed to be half perceiving a wholly new genre struggling to emerge from beneath the vestige of the old.
The Retrospective will reach its climax in the revival of all three of Britten's Church Parables to be given, possibly to their dis- advantage as individual entities within a similar framework, on one almost Wagner- length evening. In this first weekend, retro- spect was evoked by two Saturday events. A full-scale concert at Snape Maltings in the evening focused upon the perennial St Nicolas, losing something essential by removal from a church context — the girls' chorus in the storm-scene prosaically on- stage, and the trio of miraculously resur- rected pickled boys processing down a secular not an ecclesiastical aisle — but more still from a lacklustre, uncharismatic performance. The audience's average age, however, was old enough to ensure famil- iarity with the two rousing hymns placed on such firm foundations at half-time and close of play.
That morning Michael Berkeley had pre- sented his own 'private passions', rather than those of an eminent guest, in a Com- poser Portrait at the Jubilee Hall. Just as elegantly and revealingly: pounding Prokofiev (Boris Berezovsky), capricious Janacek, and Mozart's ever fresh oboe quartet (Nicholas Daniel) framed his own work to illuminating effect. Particularly fetching, Catch Me If You Can, a frisky Frisbee divertimento with darker undercur- rents catching the reflected energies from its Slavonic surrounds in the concert's sec- ond half.
And so to the Britten premiere, centre- piece of a concert justly so called on the Sunday afternoon, with the Britten-Pears orchestra directed with style and urgency by Kent Nagano. Most Britten juvenilia, including the Two Portraits written at 16 included in this same concert, turn out to show mastery of the medium without a message to convey. Much of the 'new' dou- ble concerto for violin and viola written in 1932, as he touched 19, falls into the same general area, but there is a greater drive behind and within this piece; it outstrips exercise; it had to be written.
The first movement is dramatic and astringent, propelled by a horn summons that stands equidistant between a leading motif in the Brahms first piano concerto (interesting in view of Britten's subsequent demonisation of Brahms) and the 'horns of elfland' in the Tennyson song from the Ser- enade which could be by no other compos- er. The summons is later transferred to trumpet and, as a drum tattoo, presses the whole movement onwards with dry intensi- ty. The voice is not clearly heard yet, though the lashed tightness foretells a much later concerto, the symphony for cello and orchestra where Britten has, for some of his admirers, temporarily lost his voice. The second movement unwinds in streamlined 'Thirties' lyricism. The idiom so far, though unformed, is oddly unbe- holden. Only the austere ,final decade or so of Hoist comes to mind, music from the same years and the same stylistic concerns.
But the real discovery is the finale, from the very start music of a different order. Over a soft drum roll the bassoons splutter, one soloist fizzes while the other pizzes; the woodwinds take up the splutter, the orchestra takes up the fizz, muted trumpets snarl out a march while the soloists whirl into a tarantella. This material is presented in abrupt peremptory manner and built up to a violent climax using percussion for the first time: after which, the first movement horn call returns over continuing busyness, declining into a slow, soft, epilogue-type ending. Not quite the master's voice yet, but sustained, serious, striking.
Back on foot along five miles of the Sailors' Path to Aldeburgh itself and a packed Jubilee Hall, for an evening cham- ber concert where there was no mistaking the voices' distinctiveness. Martyn Brabbins directed the Nash Ensemble in recent Oliv- er Knussen and Colin Matthews, Brahms's horn trio provided a point of repose, and the evening ended with an electrically beautiful Pierrot Lunaire from Lucy Shelton and the players. A contented audience debouched into the lanes of the nice little town at much the same hour as its pubs dis- gorged the Sunday evening locals, and in much the same mood. Aldeburgh truly con- tinues to be special.
Previous page
