The Britten Song Trail was an innovative approach to presenting Britten’s vocal repertoire across multiple venues in the composer’s adopted home
My final day at Aldeburgh began earlier than the rest of the week, with a 10am appointment at the nearby Ballroom Arts Gallery for the first in a four-hour series of modest song recitals staged in various Aldeburgh venues.
The performers – a selection of this year’s Britten Pears Young Artists Programme cohort – are the present-day equivalent of what I remember as the Britten Pears School for Advanced Musical Studies, set up by Britten and Pears before the composer’s death and where I worked for a brief while in 1995. The name might have changed, but the offer remains the same. Take a handful of young artists part way through their development and give them the opportunity to study at Snape Maltings with leading lights in the music industry, in this case, Dame Ann Murray and Roderick Williams.
These short concerts in Aldeburgh Pumphouse, Fishers Gin Distillery, Ballroom Arts, Moot Hall and Jubilee Hall and Aldeburgh Church were all interspersed with short walks around the town for the audience. A chance to digest what we’d heard and fortify ourselves for what we were about to hear next. A middle-class pilgrimage to honour the town’s most famous resident on a bright sunny day under a cloudless sky.
At the first event on my list, baritone Stephen Whitford. A hardy voice with a a big expressive range. This and an infectious squinty mischievous smile made Whitford someone who would make your mother proud. The emotional connection he achieved in such a short space of time – a mere 18 minutes of music making – was remarkable.
This in the Ballroom Arts Gallery where 26 years before (when it was part of the Aldeburgh Foundation offices and known as the ‘Peter Pears Gallery’) I along with a group of volunteers would spend the summer months stuff envelopes full of prospectuses for the Britten Pears School, posting them to colleges, conservatoires and universities as part of the recruitment drive for the next academic year’s intake.
Other notable performances were heard at the Moot Hall where tenor Martin Luther Clark performed Britten’s Canticle V – The Death of Saint Narcissus. Here, the intimacy of the mid-sixteenth century timber framed made for diligent performance and an attentive audience. Britten’s Hymn from the Suite for Harp written for Ossian Ellis and performed here by Lise Vandersmissen made for a sweet interlude.
The songs heard at Jubilee Hall performed by mezzo-soprano Lauren Young and soprano Sydney Baedke were the least successful largely because of the conventional staging which distanced performers from audience. Later, Baedke’s stage presence established with striking body language before a single note from Britten’s Quatre chansons francaises from 1928 had sounded was something I found enthralling.
One of the most touching moments were at the Gin Distillery Tasting Room. A seemingly unlikely location for a small recital. The former ‘beach hut’ now converted in a distillery affords spectacular views over the sea which in the bright sunlight of a warm June day tricked the mind into thinking we were in foreign climes. From my position sat on an expansive sofa, I could see familiar faces and assorted Aldeburgh luminaries – former TV producer Humphrey Burton, Britten’s assistant in his later years Colin Matthews and other audience members from my past present to hear another new performer – tenor Sandeep Gurrapadi sing Britten’s Songs from the Chinese.
Here there was a reassuring sense of continuity. People connected with Britten, people I remember from my time working at Aldeburgh, still present, themselves continuing to form the network on which this Festival continues to thrive.
To visit different locations for bite-sized guided discoveries of Britten’s vocal repertoire made for a pleasing way to revisit old haunts and reconnect with memories that still linger. An innovative way of presenting a range of repertoire that perhaps might have seemed like a bit of slog had it all been combined into a series of more conventional events. Much credit to outgoing Britten Pears Young Artist Programme producer George Lee for putting it together.
