Getting the keys to the toyshop: I chat to Ryan Wigglesworth about being Featured Artist at the 2026 Aldeburgh Festival featuring him as conductor, composer, & chamber musician

Ryan Wigglesworth (Photo: BBC/Gordon Burniston)

At this year’s Aldeburgh Festival, which runs from 12 to 18 June 2026, the festival’s Featured Artist will be Ryan Wigglesworth and over the 17 days of the festival there will be a chance to experience the various aspects of Ryan’s career from concerts with the BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra (BBC SSO), of which he is chief conductor, and the Knussen Chamber Orchestra, to a semi-staged production of Debussy’s Pelléas et Mélisande and chamber music with friends and colleagues, all this alongside performances of Ryan’s music and the premiere of his Viola Concerto written for violist Laurence Power.

Ryan comments that being Featured Artist means that to some extent he gets the keys to the toyshop and can help shape the festival. His performances are dotted throughout the festival but with hot spots at the beginning and end. The selections of performances bring the various parts of his life together, with orchestral performances, playing chamber music with colleagues which is a rare occurrence, and add in the premiere of his Viola Concerto.

Aldeburgh as a place is somewhere he has been involved with for a long time: it means so much to him, and he has always felt at home there. Oliver Knussen lived there and Ryan spent so much time with him there that the connection goes deep. Ryan adds that it is difficult to pinpoint what it is about Aldebugh, but it is a special place to work and the Aldeburgh Festival returns something of the founding ethos with friends making music together on stage. Britten and Pears created the festival because they wanted to do what they do but at home, and the festival has kept something of that ethos. This is why Ryan is drawn back to the place.

Ryan Wigglesworth conducting the Knussen Chamber Orchestra at the 2025 Aldeburgh Festival (Photo: Britten Pears Arts)

Ryan’s own works are usually tied to the performers for whom they were written. His Piano Concerto (2019), which he and the BBCSSO perform at Aldeburgh this year with Steven Osborne, was written for Marc-Andre Hamelin but pianist Steven Osborne has performed it a few times. What is important to Ryan are relationships that go beyond just the odd concert together, with performers such as Osborne and violist Laurence Power for whom Ryan has written his Viola Concerto. Ryan takes pleasure in getting to know them as musicians, and this is when the ideas come, when he has a player’s particular sound in his head. He comments that Power has a unique sound and that he is built to get a sound out of the viola. For Ryan, Power has such a personal approach to everything he that it is a special gift to hear his own music played by Power. Also at the festival, Ryan and soprano Sophie Bevan are performing Ryan’s song cycle Till Dawning (from 2018, setting poetry by George Herbert). The cycle was written for Sophie Bevan and as she is Ryan’s wife he describes this as the deepest collaboration of all.

Increasingly his work as a composer is not about what he wants to write but for whom. He admits that he struggles slightly with the idea of being commissioned if he does not know the performers he is writing for, if he does not have their sound in his head or know their personality.

Every programme that he is involved with is given a lot of thought, so that his pieces feel right in the context. The pieces that also feature in the programme can be one of the important factors that provide inspiration for a new work. If he knows that his Viola Concerto will sit alongside Brahms’s Symphony No. 2 (as it does at Aldeburgh on 27 June) then this gives him a context meaning he is not writing in a complete vacuum. And it doesn’t matter if the piece never sits in this context again. He admitted that programming his Piano Concerto alongside Ravel’s (which happens at this year’s festival) made him a bit nervous but ‘the battle’s already lost’.

Ryan’s Viola Concerto will be his third concerto, coming after his Violin Concerto and Piano Concerto. The concerto form is a situation that provides a dramatic kernel which ever way you look at it, pitting an individual against a group, though Ryan admits that it is difficult to get away from the concerto cliches. With the Viola Concerto he wanted to explore what feels like a slightly new direction, creating something quite spacious with a lot of room for Power to be a lyrical presence so that the work is not a tussle. And whilst Power’s projection is extraordinary, with the viola balance remains an issue and when writing the piece Ryan had to think about textures.

Ryan Wigglesworth, Sophie Bevan & members of the Knussen Chamber Orchestra at the 2025 Aldeburgh Festival (Photo: Britten Pears Arts)

Ryan does not play as much chamber music as he would like and at the festival he will be performing Birtwistle, Britten’s Cello Sonata and Shostakovich’s Seven Romances of Alexander Blok (with cellist Nicolas Altstaedt and soprano Anna-Lena Elbert). Such performances give him the opportunity to have genuine contact with sound and are very important to him. He does not do more partly because of issues of time, he is away a fair bit. Also, he is protective of his composing time, keeping his solitude, though he admits that this has become tricky now that he and Sophie Bevan have three small children! So one of things that suffer is his ability to play more chamber music.

And however much you try and plan, it is all guess work. It is tricky trying to carve out time for composing. He needs to find big enough chunks of time so that he can build in thinking time. Also, there needs to be time to get his conducting repertoire out of his bloodstream to allow his own thoughts to develop. He would love to have more of a routine so that he can take on big challenges. He quotes Sir Harrison Birtwistle on writing an opera as being like walking through a desert; it needs investment, chipping away at it every day. Ryan admits that he could imagine having a different balance to life in the future, tipping the balance in favour of composition.

Ryan and the BBC SSO open the festival with two performances of Debussy’s Pelléas et Mélisande directed by Rory Kinnear with a cast including Jacques Imbrailo (Pelléas), Sophie Bevan (Mélisande), Gordon Bintner (Golaud), Sarah Connolly (Geneviève) and John Tomlinson (Arkel). Ryan first conducted the work earlier this year with the BBC SSO at two performances in Scotland, but it has been a long time in coming. It is his favourite opera, and he has been longing to find the right opportunity to spend the time with the work. This was it, the cards fell right. Debussy’s Pelléas et Mélisande remains most composers’ favourite opera, though Ryan admits that it is difficult to put a finger on why. There is the fact of not knowing quite how Debussy did any of it, you can’t see the joins. The work remains mysterious and elusive and the more time spent with it the more it needs it.

Ryan Wigglesworth at the 2025 Aldeburgh Festival (Photo: Britten Pears Arts)

Ryan explains that Snape Maltings puts such a beautiful glow or halo around the sound that it is the perfect space for Pelléas et Mélisande,
as you don’t want something that’s too direct and immediate. Sophie
Bevan sang Mélisande with Ryan at the Scottish performances, and he
finds involving her is marvellous because when performing together the
two do not have to talk too much, collaboration is mainly telepathic. He
feels that it is a wonderful role for her, it is so mysterious. There
is so much to think about even in Mélisande’s first phrase ‘Ne me
touchez pas’. You usually hear it done as if she’s a terrified,
frightened bird. But Debussy is so precise, in both notation and rhythm.
If you perform the phrase according to Debussy’s notation, she is much
more sure of herself, perhaps knowing. It is things like this that
fascinate Ryan, and it is a privilege to work on it, every page throws
up similar problems with dramatic nuts to crack.

Also as part of this year’s festival, Ryan begins a three-year tenure as Associate Director of the Britten Pears Young Artist Programme [jointly with James Baillieu, see my interview]. For Ryan, the first iteration begins in August with a Summer Academy for chamber musicians (string quartets and pianists) and composers. Ryan deliberately wanted to leave things as open as possible. He wants things to happen, providing space for the Young Artists to discover for themselves what they can get out of the process. The string quartets will be working on Bartok’s quartets with the Kelemen Quartet who are based in Budapest and have immersed themselves in Bartok’s quartets. It seemed perfect to bring them to Aldeburgh and give the Young Artists the opportunity to tap into that level of experience and intensity. The Kelemen Quartet’s contribution will sit alongside other tutors, pianists Imogen Cooper, Steven Osborne and James Baillieu and composers Ryan himself and Julian Anderson.

He feels that this presents the opportunity to build over several years something which does not quite exist in the UK, an opportunity for composers and chamber musicians to collaborate and share ideas. There will be three young composers participating in this year’s Summer Academy and each will write a piece in advance for string quartet, piano quintet or two pianists. The pianists will also be working on the piano ensemble repertoire which Ryan finds a stimulating form for composers. The young composers will also develop sketches on site, trying things out and developing ideas which he calls a wonderful opportunity for composers.

The idea is that the Young Artists will develop a relationship with the place that will go into the future. He is keen to stress that the project goes back to Aldeburgh’s first principles of creating a musical family. So that in the past artists like Murray Perahia and Graham Johnson found in Aldeburgh a place that they could call home and where they could develop as artists.

Ryan calls Aldeburgh one of the few places where artistically your wings don’t feel clipped. The festival has always taken artistic risks, the audience knows and loves this fact, and their need and love for artistic risk is as strong as ever.

Ryan Wigglesworth

After Aldeburgh, Ryan and the BBC SSO are performing at the BBC Proms at the Royal Albert Hall on 28 July and 8 September. The July programme features music by Judith Weir, a Brett Dean premiere with soprano Claire Booth and Elgar’s Symphony No. 1. Ryan and the orchestra had a wonderful time doing Elgar’s Symphony No. 2 at the Proms a few years ago, and he comments that it is wonderful to be able to bring the First Symphony. Ryan thinks it is healthy for an orchestra to play this music, to work on it a lot and develop a sound, they come to appreciate the complexity in bringing it alive with its shadows and colours. For their second Prom they are performing Varese, Bartok’s Music for Strings, Percussion and Celesta, and Rachmaninov’s Symphony No. 3. Both the Bartok and the Rachmaninov of which were written in the same year (1936), and both are pieces that he adores.