Aldeburgh Festival broadens its horizons with record premieres planned for 2022

Set current trials and tribulations aside. Some music festivals are not just trying to keep going but making plans for a bigger, better future. Having proved one of the most determined to stay active in the past 18 months, the Aldeburgh Festival, co-founded by composer Benjamin Britten and tenor Peter Pears, his partner, is today announcing a 2022 festival that sets its sights high.

It promises to be a busy year. Queen Elizabeth will celebrate 70 years on the throne with a Platinum Jubilee festival on June 2-5, which coincides with the opening weekend of the festival. It is also the 50th anniversary of the Britten Pears Young Artist Programme, now expanded into year-round projects and events, and a day of concerts will mark what would have been the 70th birthday of composer and former Aldeburgh artistic director Oliver Knussen.

“With these anniversaries and everything else, we felt the programme could become very congested,” says Roger Wright, chief executive of Britten Pears Arts, which runs the festival. “So next year’s festival will be three weeks rather than two, as it was for a short period in the late 1960s.”

There is no other festival quite like Aldeburgh. Situated on the windswept east coast of England, it looks out over the grey expanse of the North Sea and the flat Suffolk fens. In the stillness of this never-ending landscape, Britten found his ideal place to live and work, and on a misty night it is still possible to imagine the anti-hero fisherman of his opera Peter Grimes stalking the shore. Britten’s spirit and the ambitions he had for music here continue to cast a potent spell.

No festival, though, can afford to stand still. In 2022, Aldeburgh will present the highest number of premieres of new music in its history, including 19 commissions from composers such as Laura Bowler, Francisco Coll, Bushra El-Turk, Colin Matthews, Mark-Anthony Turnage and Tom Coult, whose opera Violet gets its delayed first performance.

Featured artists include violinist Nicola Benedetti, playing baroque music and Messiaen’s Quatuor pour la fin du temps, cellist Laura van der Heijden, the Doric String Quartet and Mark Simpson, clarinettist and composer of the moment, following his heaven-storming Violin Concerto earlier this year.

It will also be a pleasure, and probably a relief, to get back to the festival’s venues across the region, such as the churches at Orford and Blythburgh. The main venue, Snape Maltings, makes an impressive, multi-hall centre these days, but the festival was never meant to be rooted in one spot.

So much of what it represents now was foreseen by Britten and Pears when they founded the festival with librettist Eric Crozier in 1948. Britten’s music will play a significant part, as always, but is never dominant, not least because very little of his output is awaiting rediscovery.

Expansion has been driven by the acquisition of the whole site at Snape Maltings, which has raised the profile of the year-round work. This includes high-profile masterclasses and Aldeburgh Young Musicians, but much else besides — community work in creative health, such as for patients with dementia and Parkinson’s disease, and in criminal justice in local prisons.

“This is all true to the vision Britten and Pears had,” says Wright. “They would not have known that our society would have such a challenge with dementia, or have expected the socio-economic deprivation in our area. But what they did know, and worked with, was music’s unique power to connect people. The vision they had for a site for music that is rooted locally, but makes a national and international impact, is absolutely where we are now.”

That is equally true for the development of the campus. “These days a young artists programme is not such an unusual thing, but 50 years ago it was very innovative,” he says. “I wonder if seeing Tanglewood [the Boston Symphony Orchestra’s summer home] in the 1940s made a lasting impression on Britten. There are pictures of him and Pears looking at a model of a redeveloped Snape Maltings even before they had acquired some of the additional buildings. A 1970 master plan is uncannily like the way the site has developed since.”

The result is that Britten Pears Arts has become an important force in the local economy. About 150-200 people work on site, mostly in retail, catering and the charitable organisation, and a much wider impact comes through tourism. The target is to raise £2m a year from fundraising, more than is received from the Arts Council, and that is a challenge with the demographic on the Suffolk coast.

Wright says that he saw the importance of engaging with the community when he was artistic administrator of the Cleveland Orchestra. “It is as unlikely to have an orchestra of such quality in a place like Cleveland as it is to have a festival like Aldeburgh on the Suffolk coast,” he says. “What they share is an audience and a set of supporters who have [a powerful] sense of ownership, and that will pay back in all sorts of ways. If the alternative is indifference, you are dead in the water.”

Following from that could be closer co-operation with the US. The Ojai Music Festival in California closely parallels Aldeburgh and the two have shared projects in the past. Wright is in favour of such working together “if festivals generally can be less precious about who gets what first”.

One cloud on the horizon is Britten’s music coming out of copyright in 2047. A foretaste came during lockdown, when £1m of royalty income from performances was lost overnight.

Wright says Aldeburgh knows it cannot put off thinking about it until 2045. One possible answer is to develop the last third of the Snape Maltings site that is derelict, probably for accommodation for students and tutors. “That would be back to the vision of Britten and Pears for a creative campus. It is in our sights, but represents a huge capital project.”

In the meantime, all eyes are on the 2022 festival. The Queen’s jubilee will be marked with music from her coronation year, such as the suite from Britten’s opera Gloriana. A highlight of the tribute to Knussen will be the premiere of his unfinished orchestral work Cleveland Pictures. A clutch of climate-change works includes Gregor A Mayrhofer’s intriguing Recycling Concerto, featuring hundreds of pieces of rubbish refashioned as percussion. As Wright says: “No standing still.”

Aldeburgh Festival 2022, June 3-26, brittenpearsarts.org