It’s a while since I was at a concert spiked with lavender incense. Last century maybe. It was the only whiff of nostalgia in Snape Maltings’s Festival of New, subtitled “Can we test this out?”. You may associate this Suffolk venue chiefly with the composer Benjamin Britten. Without him, and the Aldeburgh festival he co-founded and which is based here, there would be no concert hall with unique vistas of reed beds and big skies. The site, with new studios, galleries and places to stay, now offers far more than Britten ever envisaged. This two-day event consisted of diverse groups performing short, innovative programmes from hip-hop to jazz to electronica. Each was the result of residencies that have taken place here year round.
Three I sampled gave a glimpse into the range of ambitious experiments going on in music now. First, that lavender incense: it added atmosphere, in a literal sense, to Voicescolourmotion, a sound and light installation by singer-songwriter Fran Lobo, with Gawain Hewitt. We entered a small, darkened studio illuminated by coloured LED stage lights positioned at waist height next to loudspeakers, and were encouraged to wander round. An initial impression that this was a retro encounter group soon vanished. Lobo had created a four-movement, 20-minute piece, entirely by multitracking and sampling her own voice, charting the trauma of losing her voice for several months three years ago. Close harmony, buoyant and sonorous, disintegrated into raw noise, gradually finding recovery and serene release, coloured lights shifting accordingly. This is a work in progress (with more planned at the V&A in November), but its clarity and focus were evident.
The Dutch contemporary jazz trio Tin Men and the Telephone turned the audience into active participants via big screen and smartphone app for their humorous but serious World Domination show: we voted for populist world leaders to be banished from the planet – gruesome Trump and Putin memes set to music – and made up our own chords and melodies on the app, on which the trio improvised virtuosically. In contrast, Silence Makes Perfect, a music drama made of live and pre-recorded sound by singer Yael Rasooly and pianist Amit Dolberg, asked only that we allow our nerves to be shredded by a chilling tale of a repressed girl prodigy and a violent truth that cannot be silenced. Using arrangements of music by Debussy, Stockhausen, Schubert, Kurt Weill and others, this “requiem to the lost naive world of a child” transformed the Britten Studio into a chamber of horror, complete with puppets made from broken instruments, ghosts of a brilliant career that never was: beautifully and disturbingly done.
It felt a short step from this alienating world to a chilly canal-side rooftop in Haggerston, east London for Peter Maxwell Davies’s Eight Songs for a Mad King staged by Shadwell Opera and nimbly directed by Jack Furness. The venue was the Potemkin theatre, a temporary, brightly coloured timber structure and winner of the 2019 Antepavilion architecture prize. On paper this 1969 monodrama, based on the words of King George III, can be daunting and claustrophobic: six instrumentalists, here the excellent Shadwell Ensemble conducted by Chris Stark, and a vocally dexterous baritone, capturing the shrill mental torments of a crazed monarch who tries to make his caged birds sing. It culminates in a violin being smashed to bits, a world ending.
This performance transformed it into a work of greater resonance, tenderness and heart. Experiencing it in the open air, to a backdrop of sirens, planes and nearby Hackney carnival, softened its sharpest corners. Chiefly, however, it was thanks to the singer Benedict Nelson, whose brave, poised and technically brilliant performance drew on inner feelings rather than the more usual, extrovert histrionics. Look out for this enterprising company’s next show: Oliver Knussen’s Where the Wild Things Are, at London’s Alexandra Palace on 26 October.
This takes us full circle. Knussen, composer, teacher, mentor, who died at his Suffolk home last year, was as much a part of Snape and Aldeburgh as Britten. A new ensemble in his honour, the Knussen Chamber Orchestra, founded by his friend and former pupil Ryan Wigglesworth, gave the last Cadogan Hall Prom of the season. A highlight of the elegantly constructed programme (listen on catch-up) was a new piece by Freya Waley-Cohen (born 1989): Naiad, delicate and filigree, fast within slow, inspired by light on the scales of a fish, dew on a spider’s web, the movement of bees between flowers. This eye and ear for detail was the best possible homage to Knussen, echoing his own rigorous aesthetic. This concert reflected his musical and human generosity and was full of composers, turning out on a wet Monday lunchtime to remember their beloved, irreplaceable friend.
Star ratings (out of five):
Festival of New ★★★★
Eight Songs for a Mad King ★★★★
