This was the first programme with music by Britten in this year’s Aldeburgh Festival, performed by the Knussen Chamber Orchestra made up of musicians from the Royal Academy of Music and Royal College of Music with guest section leaders including Laura van der Heijde and Scott Dickinson. The premiere of Helen Grime’s song cycle Folk takes centre stage. Later, Festival featured artist tenor Allan Clayton in Britten’s masterful collection of verses Nocturne.
This marks fifty years since the premiere of Britten’s A Suite on English Folk Tunes at the Aldeburgh Festival in 1975. The opening movement sees the orchestra conducted by Ryan Wigglesworth really pack a punch, making the first statement of this well-known late work urgent. The strings were particularly versatile switching from grit and grist in the opening Cakes & Ale, to a more sonorous evocation of melancholy in the second movement The Bitter Withy. Light work made of the marching band that passes through in Hankin’ Booby (originally written for the opening of the Queen Elizabeth Hall in London, in 1967), with some delectable hard-edged wind sonorities that are reassuring to hear in Snape Maltings Concert Hall. There was electrifying (and terrifying) virtuosity driving Hunt the Squirrel. A slight loss of focus made the concluding Lord Melbourne lack cohesion compared with that which had gone before.
Soprano Claire Booth set the mood, commanding focus the moment she purposefully strode onto stage for Helen Grimes’ Folk. The four symphonic episodes set Zoe Gilbert’s often gripping text from her 2018 novel of the same name. Grime’s work builds on Gilbert’s dark, threatening, mysterious and at times mischievous material, drawing on all the forces of the orchestra to create big bold confident sounds that build evocative images. Booth throws herself into each song, digging the rock-infused muscular sound of the first Prick Song with an infectious swagger. The second movement Fishkin, Hareskin has more mystical and mysterious dreamlike material, and calls on Booth’s considerable technique and dedication to pull off a characteristically demanding vocal line from Grime. Water Bull Bride is the most resonant of the cycle, score and text closely aligned, drawing the audience deeper into the story of the text, as the protagonist herself gets drawn deeper into the water. Long Have I Lain concludes this consistently strong score in which the ideas are fast moving and attention never wanes.
Festival featured tenor Allan Clayton is mesmerising in Britten’s Nocturne. Written in 1958 and premiered by partner Peter Pears and the BBC Symphony Orchestra at the Leeds Centenary Festival. The thirty minute work sets eight verses drawn from a range of anthologies, creating an evocation of sleep that the composer doubted initially: ‘It won’t be madly popular because it is the strangest and remotest thing,’ he wrote to Marion Harewood. In Clayton’s performance there was a hint of Pears’ distinctive sound present in the opening On a poet’s lips I slept that reassured in the reminiscences it stirred. This quickly shifted into a more assertive sound in the subsequent The Kraken. The measure of the tenor’s immense versatility is heard in the penultimate two poems. In Wilfred Owen’s The Kind Ghosts there is a delectable tension in Clayton’s upper register, complemented by silky smooth phrasing and crystal clear diction. His unfussy relatable sound makes him easy to connect with. As his vocal line develops, a cor anglais menacingly coils and entwines itself. In the subsequent Sleep and Poetry by Keats, Clayton responds to Britten’s descriptive scoring of insects, mice and cats with low-key evocations that prompt titters in the auditorium.
