Review – Freya Waley-Cohen’s ‘The Dreamer’ at Aldeburgh Festival 2026

Elizabeth Ogonek’s Sleep & Unremembrance takes its starting point from Wisława Szymborska’s poem While Sleeping, about the time when it is known that life is coming to an end and the recollection of those experiences that have made up that life. It’s the second time this Festival that Ogonek’s writing has set the tone for thinking, this time conveying the sense that a near-cacophony of memories slowly subside into something tonal and ultimately comforting. Thoughts start to flow about the nature of dreaming, what it means to dream. Like the familiar and unfamiliar scores that make up this concert, Ogonek’s score offers both permission and a route map for exploring the confusing or inexplicable. 

In ‘The Dreamer’ – the new violin concerto premiered by Tamsin Waley-Cohen at the Aldeburgh Festival – composer Freya Waley-Cohen further demonstrates how she is an instinctive orchestrator, comfortable deploying large forces with evident pleasure. She makes full use of the orchestra. Mildly menacing glissandi, high strings, goosey woodwind, and judicious use of eerie vibraphone could easily be off the shelf solutions to a creative challenge, but in Waley-Cohen’s hands instrumental choices aren’t enhancing the ideas so much as giving them a present day relevance. Such fleeting pleasures are difficult to capture. Like dreams that fade the moment we actively seek to capture them on waking, maybe that’s the point. In the concluding bars, uncompromising big pillowy punches from the orchestra signal this all night bedroom story has to come to an end. A gentle riot of sound now needs its rest. 

Tamsin Waley-Cohen responds to the full and varied writing with a commanding presence. There is a grounded style to her playing that conveys both strength and warmth. This is a powerful sound in all registers that asserts and occupies. Resonates. Sings. Dances. The score invites, the soloist accepts. 

Conductor Kevin John Edusei’s take on Rachmaninov’s Symphonic Dances was thorough. His meticulous approach to tempi sometimes made the gear shifts slow bordering on the languid. The BBC National Orchestra of Wales string section earned their bus ride home to Cardiff with a sound that stirred the soul and made home feel far far away. Dynamic contrasts in the wider ensemble were few and far between. The brass sometimes dominated, so too timpani. At times, the fortissimos tested the grouting and shook the foundations. And as much as I appreciate the tamtam had been paid for, I’m not sure it needed to ring out for as long as it did. Entries sometimes floundered. Given the searing heat, it was impressive that intonation remained as resolute as it did. Whilst the detail was there, the narrative spine ended up buried. It was accurate. It just didn’t move.