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- Snape Maltings Concert Hall
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- Hoffman Building, Snape Maltings
Well, I’ve finally found a minute to write about my time at the first week of the Aldeburgh Festival – and what a time it was! The best thing was by far the concert line-up. It was like all of the great concerts one could find in London over a few months squeezed into one week. My first task as a Hesse student was to participate in a ‘performance’ of Ligeti’s Poéme symphonique for 100 metronomes which was actually a lot of fun. Three 20 minute performances went well (I purposely avoid saying ‘to plan’).
There were several concerts which I especially enjoyed. The BBC Symphony Orchestra concert on Friday 19 June at Snape featured an exhilarating performance by Susanna Anderson of Julian Anderson’s Shir Hashirim for soprano and orchestra. This is a setting of the Hebrew text of the Song of Songs, verses of love poetry. The programme note gives some idea of the magnificence of the piece:
“The orchestral part is highly elaborate and uses a wide range of textures and harmonic/melodic colours in an attempt to match the richness of the text. The modal writing uses hybrid scales which spread over several registers without exact repetition; this enables the orchestral writing to operate on more than one speed and metre simultaneously, and to vary in vocabulary from the very diatonic to the densely chromatic and even microtonal.” (Programme note by Julian Anderson 2009)
The same concert included the premiere of George Benjamin’s new work Duet for piano and orchestra (2008) and a simply breathtaking performance of Ravel’s Piano Concerto for the left hand (1929-30) by Pierre-Laurent Aimard.
The German soprano Claudia Barainsky stepped in at very short notice to replace Christiane Oelze and gave a delightful concert on Tuesday evening 16 June at Snape. I found her performance of Olivier Messaien’s Poémes pour Mi (1937) full of nuance and character.
Oliver Knussen conducted the Birmingham Contemporary Music Group in an exciting programme of Knussen, Helen Grime, Carter and Stockhausen on Saturday June 20 at Snape. I quite enjoyed Grime’s Aldeburgh commission A Cold Spring. It was a well-crafted, confidently written piece and I look forward to hearing more of her music in the future. Unfortuantely, Stockhausen’s Zodiac (2007) was not so enjoyable to sit through and seemed to ramble on forever.
