This is a festival which has all the appearances of being conservative but actually isn't, writes Michael Dervan.
THE ALDEBURGH Festival is a venerable institution at a time of change. On the one hand, there's the physical change of a large building project. The festival's home at a converted maltings in Snape (a village six miles inland from the coastal village after which the festival is named) is dominated by a towering crane and plenty of scaffolding.
And on the other hand there's a change of artistic director, with French pianist Pierre-Laurent Aimard (no stranger to the festival) taking over next year from composer Thomas Adès.
The festival has all the appearance of being a conservative affair. It's a legacy of the composer Benjamin Britten and his partner, the tenor, Peter Pears, and functions partly as an annual showcase for Britten's music - 10 of his pieces feature in the 17 days of this year's programme. And the audience is far from young, with only a small proportion of the concert-goers aged below 50. Yet it's not actually a conservative audience. This year it cheered works by featured composer György Kurtág, his fellow-Hungarian György Ligeti and Ireland's Gerald Barry more resoundingly than it did pieces by the great names of the classical canon.
Barry has gone off on a new tack. He's squaring up to Beethoven, has written a piece with the composer's name as its title, and is actively pursuing the idea of writing an opera on the composer. Barry's Beethoven, first heard in Birmingham in March, is a setting for bass (Stephen Richardson) and ensemble (the Birmingham Contemporary Music Group under Thomas Adès) of the famous letters to the "immortal beloved", using the English text of Galway-woman Emily Anderson's translation.
Barry's is a mundane Beethoven, the everyday concerns about the roughness of travel and the times for posting letters are set as fully as the expressions of spiritual ardour, and at the crucial ending, even more so. Barry's Beethoven is engaged in a kind of wishful thinking, a desire to be in state of desire, and Barry suggests this by forcing the final words into a rapid, almost tongue-twisterish delivery that makes all the concerns over mailcoaches seem like an excuse to get off the topic.
The musical style veers from a honking, mock neo-classical opening driven by bass clarinet and double bassoon in purest C major to a calm, hymn-like ending in remotest F sharp major. Barry is notorious for the mangling violence and contortionist flexibility with which he treats words. Here, however, most of the words come across easily, although the voice does soar into falsetto and sink into Stygian depths.
Stephen Richardson, with the aid of some sound reinforcement, traversed the range with imaginative verve and relish. His association with Barry's music is a long one, and he always gives the feeling of being expressively liberated rather than technically constrained by the extremities of the demands. Adès, too, is something of a Barry specialist, and an influential promoter of his fellow composer's work.
There's always an extra, glinting sharpness when Adès is involved in a Barry performance. And there was on this occasion, too. If Barry ever does complete an opera on Beethoven, Adès will surely be the man to conduct it. Barry has always struck an independent line in relation to the fashionable compositional concerns of the day.
So, too, has György Kurtág, now an alert and vivacious 82-year-old, who works in miniatures. His breakthrough piece in the West, Messages of the Late Miss RV Troussova (1976-80), a setting of short poems by Rimma Dalos giving a woman's perspective on love ("Great misery - / that's love. / Is there any greater happiness?"), was delivered with riveting presence by soprano Natalia Zagorinskaia. The later Dalos settings, Scenes from a Novel(1979-82), heard in a concert from soprano Maria Husmann and the ensemble Psappha, are even more spare and more penetrating.
Kurtág is one of those composers who shaves things down so that not just a single gesture, but a single note can become a major event. Nowhere was this facet of his work better displayed than in cellist Steven Isserlis's playing of four pieces from Signs, Games and Messages(1989-97). It may seem an odd thing to say, but these came across as a kind of sound poetry made out of notes - the sounds of the cello at one attached and skilfully detached from their conventional associations.
Isserlis was giving a recital with Adès, where the highlight of their partnership came at the end of the evening, in a mesmerising performance of Poulenc's Cello Sonata, a work that even the composer seems not to have been fully convinced by, and which Isserlis and Adès here managed to turn into a succession of delectable lollipop moments.
My four-day sampling of the festival also included remarkably fresh approaches to Haydn, Debussy and Mendelssohn from the Modigliani Quartet, a young group from France, the Belcea Quartet playing Schubert with extravagant inwardness, pianist Imogen Cooper taking an insightfully un-Bartókian approach to a selection of Bartók's 14 Bagatelles, a death obsessed Schubert programme delivered in a strangely post-modern style by baritone Robert Holl and pianist Rudolf Jansen, and a programme from the Britten Sinfonia and Pierre-Laurent Aimard.
