Inventive opera Violet launches Aldeburgh Festival — review

A walk along Aldeburgh High Street is not the same this year. For the first time since the Aldeburgh Festival began in 1948, the shop windows are not filled with displays picturing Benjamin Britten, one of the event’s founders and the town’s most celebrated resident. In their place is an explosion of Platinum Jubilee memorabilia with enough union flags to empty every stockist in eastern England.

The festival usually lasts two weeks, but this year an extra week has been added at the start. After two years without a summer festival, there was a backlog of new music premieres and other works waiting for performances. The result is that the opening night fell on the jubilee weekend. The Queen opened the concert hall at Snape Maltings in 1967 (and reopened it in 1970 when it was rebuilt after a fire), but the opening events did not include music with a royal connection. That will come later.

Aldeburgh’s mission is to follow the path set out by Britten and his co-founders Peter Pears, his partner, and Eric Crozier. That means keeping up with the latest contemporary music while welcoming featured artists such as violinist Nicola Benedetti and composer Ryan Wigglesworth, and encouraging young musicians, one of Britten’s goals from the earliest years.

This year it opened with a new opera. Originally planned for 2020, Tom Coult’s Violet spans 90 minutes (no pause for an interval) of mounting tension as a clock ticks away. In an unidentified town, time starts to disappear by one hour a day, and the opera follows the differing reactions in one house, as the pressure of impending doom weighs upon the inhabitants. Is this the end of the world?

The premise is a good one. Operas based on simple stories tend to work well as there is not too much material for the composer to handle, and Alice Birch’s libretto is shorter and pithier than most. The laconic conversations between the four characters leave a lot unsaid, allowing space for the music to create a palpable sense of a mysterious, mortal threat.

Coult’s score for 13 instrumentalists is unfailingly inventive in detail. It is unlikely that the audience will have been ticking off the unusual sounds, but suffice to say there are not many operas that call for tom-toms, friction mallet, honey spoons, dog-clickers with Blu Tack and three crocodile clips. The music holds the attention minute by minute, but through the first half there is not a clear sense of where it is going. That only comes as the clock nears zero hour. Then the music becomes thinner, sparer, each note more precious, as if the oxygen is running out, a sound-world Coult describes as “desiccated, frayed, curdled”.

The countdown of the town clock is permanently front of stage in Jude Christian’s production. Anna Dennis makes a charismatic lead as Violet, the woman who has lived without purpose through her life only to come alive when time is running out. Richard Burkhard, Frances Gregory and Andrew Mackenzie-Wicks complete a strong cast and Andrew Gourlay conducts the versatile players of the London Sinfonietta.

How does it end? Well, no spoilers here, but anybody worried that the opera might fizzle out in a glib ending has nothing to fear. This Music Theatre Wales production will visit Hackney Empire, London, and three other venues over the summer.

★★★★☆

Two other recent works were notable in the first weekend. Mark Simpson’s Clarinet Quintet, first heard earlier this year in Oxford, packs a huge amount into just over 20 minutes. Out of the simplest of ideas — a stirring, a murmur — the music flies off into heights of passion and depths of introspection, often shuddering to a silence, as if shocked at its own intensity. Simpson himself was the clarinettist with the Solem Quartet. Could any other player have pushed the emotional boundaries so hard, either here or in his memorable performance of Mozart’s Clarinet Quintet?

★★★★☆

Later that day, Laura Bowler’s music-theatre piece Houses Slide arrived in Aldeburgh, following its London premiere last year. Its theme is climate change, told through recorded public interviews and a text sung by Jessica Aszodi, while static cyclists generate the electricity for the musicians’ lights. Watching them pedalling away is the sole visual element and only about half the words are audible, so the climate change message was pretty garbled. One thought: if it takes 14 cyclists to power a small-scale work like this, how many would be needed to send the volts through a giant Mahler symphony?

★★☆☆☆

Festival continues to June 26, brittenpearsarts.org