Aldeburgh Festival opens with Giant, an otherworldly new opera

The celebration of music and place has always been at the heart of the Aldeburgh Festival. Since Benjamin Britten led the founding of the festival in 1948, the town itself may have changed, becoming an upmarket destination with many holiday lets, but the panoramic views of the Suffolk fens and village-like seafront remain unspoilt. 

For the festival, the intervening 75 years have been a period of reinvention. From his international standing as a composer, Britten was able to bring in musician friends and colleagues at a similar level to perform. Once he and that generation had passed on, it was never going to be possible for the festival to continue as it had been, and it is prospering today as a showcase for the new and inventive in music.

This year’s programme follows that trend. Featured musicians include a pair of composers who have much to say, Cassandra Miller from Canada and Anna Thorvaldsdottir from Iceland, and two performers who are keen to break the mould, pianist Pavel Kolesnikov and baritone Roderick Williams, basking in the regal glow of his appearance at the coronation.

An opera to start is de rigueur. It is a shame that these are no longer full-length operas staged in the main Snape Maltings, but the smaller Britten Studio has hosted an almost unbroken series of successful chamber-sized operas, so maybe the venue is blessed.

No two have been remotely the same and Sarah Angliss’s Giant proved to be another one-off. It tells the story of the 18th-century “Irish giant”, Charles Byrne. His dying wish was that his body would not be put on public display, but an unscrupulous physician arranged to have it stolen before the funeral.

The opera, 80 minutes straight through, includes roles for the physician and Byrne’s manager, who exhibits him like a freak show, both written with a sharp ear by librettist Ross Sutherland. Their rapacious, down-to-earth attitudes contrast with the almost noble characterisation of Byrne, who was said to be a gentle soul, an easy target for exploitation.

A look at Angliss’s spare musical score, with its tinkling percussion, ethereal string chords and distant pre-recorded sounds, might suggest that it could never fit a story of such dark realism. Instead, the two complement each other. The otherworldly music adds an extra layer, questioning, uneasy, timeless, that elevates the issues involved to a higher level.

Casting the giant cannot be easy, but Karim Sulayman, perched on six-inch heels, looked convincing and captured Byrne’s sensitivity. Jonathan Gunthorpe and Gweneth Ann Rand created vivid characters out of the physician and manager, not only singing well, but delivering spoken text with uncommon skill. Héloïse Werner, Melanie Pappenheim and Steven Beard completed a fine cast, very well directed by Sarah Fahie and played by a small ensemble, led by Ben Smith at the keyboard.

★★★★☆ 

The start of the festival also included late-night and morning recitals by the Kreutzer Quartet. Their programmes featured mostly living British composers and included two premieres. 

David Horne’s Different Ghosts for clarinet quintet, with clarinettist Linda Merrick, creates a distinctive, spectral atmosphere of incorporeal sounds, though the different personalities of the seven ghosts were sometimes hard to discern. David Matthews’s String Quartet No 17 showed how much life there still is in traditional structures and a musical language that verges on Romanticism.

Best of the rest were Priaulx Rainier’s tautly argued String Quartet in C Minor of 1939 and a brief lament, entitled Remember, by Eleanor Alberga. All would have benefited from more secure playing from the Kreutzer Quartet, woeful in tuning even in their Haydn and Mozart, but it seems ungenerous to complain when this ensemble champions music that other string quartets rarely reach.

★★★☆☆

Festival continues to June 25, brittenpearsarts.org