From Young Apollo to the Cello Symphony to the Poet’s Echo to Phaedra: the range of Britten’s composing career explored by Britten Sinfonia at Aldeburgh Festival alongside new works

Genevieve Lacey, Gemma New, Britten Sinfonia, Aldeburgh Festival (Photo: Britten Pears Arts)

Steve (Stelios) Adam: et døgn (one day), Lisa Illean/Binchois: Chansons, Lisa Illean: New works for recorder, strings and pre-recorded sounds, Brett Dean: Carlo, Britten: Cello Symphony; Genevieve Lacey recorder, Laura van der Heijden cello, Britten Sinfonia, cond. Gemma New; Snape Maltings Concert Hall

Britten: The Poet’s Echo, Mussorgsky: Songs and Dances of Death, Ryan Wigglesworth: Till Dawning, Britten: Folksong arrangements on Moore’s Irish Melodies; Sophie Bevan soprano, Ryan Wigglesworth piano; Britten Studio, Snape Maltings.

Britten: Young Apollo, Haydn: Arianna a Naxos, Stravinsky: Apollon musagète, John Woolrich: Ulysses Awakes, Charpentier: ‘Quel prix de mon amour’ (from Médée), Britten: Phaedra; Britten Sinfonia, Zoë Beyers violin/director, Helen Charlston, mezzo-soprano; Snape Maltings Concert Hall

Reviewed by Tony Cooper (17 & 18 June 2026)

Two programmes curated by Britten Sinfonia featured grand performances of Brett Dean’s Carlo and Britten’s Cello Symphony, and the fresh and youthful mezzo voice of Helen Charlston in an illuminating and uplifting programme

Curated by the Britten Sinfonia, the concert on Wednesday 17 June at the Aldeburgh Festival featured an eclectic and inquisitive programme which opened with a relatively short seven-minute piece conceived by Australian futuristic composer, Steve (Stelios) Adam, who harbours a long-term fascination with music, sound and its associated technologies therefore electroacoustic composition and computer-generated music lies at the very heart of his creative output.

Scored for recorder and electroacoustic engineering, et døgn (one day), a delicately constructed work, created a hauntingly beautiful exploration and fusion of ‘live’ music and computer-generated sound witnessing virtuoso Australian recorderist, Genevieve Lacey, impeccable in her playing, employing the use of four recorders – bass, tenor, descant and treble, handmade by Joanne Saunders and Fred Morgan – which was captivating throughout the performance.

An Australian takeover, this enviable concert also projected a couple of works by Australian composer (now based in UK) Lisa Illean whose arrangement of Gilles Binchois, Chansons featured the fine strings of the Britten Sinfonia who, standing and gathered in a semicircle round their New Zealand conductor, Gemma New, created an intimate environment for what was an intimate and refreshing work originated by this well-loved composer of the 15th century renowned for his settings of secular chansons.

Lisa Illean’s second offering to this well-curated programme Swellsong received its UK première in the presence of the composer. Scored for recorder, strings and pre-recorded orchestral sounds, the mixing engineer on stage finely balanced the delicate acoustic output of the strings which were tenderly heard against a breathy subtle projection of the recorder.

A lovely, inspiring and thoughtful work, however, it incorporated the plainsong melody ‘Fulcite me floribus’ (Strengthen me with flowers), a liturgical text recollecting love and grief transfigured through faith who in Illean’s thought processes reimagines the text in relation to light, water and time thereby crafting a phantasy soundscape occupying another world!

Yet another Australian and a composer I greatly admire, Brett Dean, got on the bill, too, with an offering of his enlightened 20-minute piece Carlo, a psychological portrait of the 16th-century composer, Carlo Gesualdo, scored for string orchestra, pre-recorded tape and sampler. As the piece unfolds, the taped vocal tracks were fascinatingly and electronically manipulated by an onstage technician that offered an otherworldly effect to the overall composition.

Nonetheless, a strong and richly-textured piece of writing, Dean’s work explores the dark subconscious, intense guilt and historical murder associated with the Renaissance composer, Carlo Gesualdo, particularly in the passage witnessing the cellos playing thirteen to the dozen in a frenzied and urgent attack heard against the rapid and acceleration of their violin neighbours to evoke a panicked, racing heartbeat for the manic frenzy surrounding Gesualdo’s psychological breakdown.

The work concludes with a climactic visceral sequence that strips Gesualdo’s madrigals down to mere whisperings, nervous breath sounds and dramatic string textures which grow in intensity thereby creating a harrowing sonic echo of the tragic 1590 double murder by stabbing of Gesualdo’s wife Donna Maria d’Avalos and her lover Fabrizio Carafa (Duke of Andria) in ‘flagrante delicto’ in his bedroom in Naples.

Britten: Cello Symphony – Laura van der Heijden, Gemma New, Britten Sinfonia, Aldeburgh Festival (Photo: Britten Pears Arts)

The second half of the programme was devoted to one work, Britten’s Cello Symphony, written for the legendary Russian cellist, Mstislav Rostropovich, who premièred the work in Moscow in March 1964 in the Great Hall of the Moscow Conservatoire with the composer conducting while the work received its Aldeburgh Festival première in June of the same year. A year later, Rostropovich performed it at the Edinburgh Festival (Usher Hall) with the Royal Scottish National Orchestra when Lord Harewood showcased the works of Britten alongside the masterpieces of Schubert.

A well-constructed piece in four movements, the Cello Symphony marked Britten’s return to traditional symphonic writing after focusing so much of his time on opera and vocal music with the work containing a segment of dark, jagged and intense emotions thereby sharing the turbulent undertones of War Requiem. Britten wisely called it a ‘symphony’ rather than a ‘concerto’ because the solo cello and orchestra share musical material as equal partners.

I attended Rostropovich’s stimulating and pleasing performance in Edinburgh and, therefore, I was more than pleased to see Laura van der Heijden – a dynamic young blood on top of her game – delivering an exceptional and gifted performance at Snape Maltings as part of the 77th Aldeburgh Festival.

The cello’s opening statement was alert and quite appealing while the strong timpani presence of the work complemented by a large brass section embodied the struggle of the individual against the power of destructive forces highlighting a forceful and penetrating nature that stamped the credentials of a fine and invigorating work.

Widely described as a highly charged journey from darkness to a hard-won and almost exhausting triumph, the work ends with a profound ‘passacaglia’ where the music slowly fades to a solitary and ghostly heartbeat. And in the quiet and final bars of this esteemed and gracious work, an audacious and ambiguous statement arises between the cello and orchestra leaving the audience suspended in silence with an echo of dissonance and a tense unresolved clash making its mark.

Intimate song-cycles and voice-and-piano programmes have always been woven into the musical canvas of the Aldeburgh Festival therefore it was so pleasurable attending the recital at the Britten Studio given on the afternoon of Thursday 18th June by Sophie Bevan accompanied by Ryan Wigglesworth performing a deeply-felt programme of songs by Mussorgsky, Britten and, indeed, Wigglesworth himself.

The performance got underway with an exacting reading of Britten’s The Poet’s Echo featuring settings of six poems by the famed Russian poet, Alexander Pushkin, written for Russian soprano, Galina Vishnevskaya. The cycle explores themes of unrequited love, the anguish of insomnia and the struggle of an artist trying to connect with an uncomprehending world.

Therefore, from the opening song ‘Echo’ where the soprano’s lines are eerily and graciously ‘echoed’ by the piano to the closing piece ‘Lines Written During a Sleepless Night’, Bevan truly explores and duly captures the depth of Britten’s intensive writing that continued with Mussorgsky’s Songs and Dances of Death, a haunting cycle composed in the mid-1870s comprising four dramatic realistic songs that personifies ‘death’ as a charismatic and inevitable figure who claims lives in different ways.

For instance, in the first song ‘Lullaby’ a mother cradles her sick and feverish child with ‘death’ arriving disguised as a gentle babysitter singing to the child and rocking it into an eternal peaceful sleep while the last song ‘The Field Marshal’, ‘death’ appears on a bloody battlefield witnessing a commanding officer surveying the carnage while claiming the ‘souls’ of the Fallen and triumphantly asserting his enduring reign with the subject of death, time, faith, love, sleep and sleeplessness with this. An atmospheric and thought-provoking song-cycle ending,, it was rewardingly sung and dramatically portrayed by Bevan – a highlight of the festival.

A featured artist at this year’s festival, Ryan Wigglesworth also presented his song-cycle Till Dawning, a work built round the events of Holy Week and Easter, comprising a setting of four devotional poems from the 17th-century collection The Temple by George Herbert which Wigglesworth and Bevan premièred in 2018.

A sad and joyful piece at the same time, the performance was refreshing and devotional to the core with Bevan’s crystal-clear diction and understanding of the cycle paramount in every conceivable way thereby offering the audience a masterful, flawless and technically-assured performance of Herbert’s revered settings.

The work opens with ‘The Agonie’, a meditation focusing on the Garden of Gethsemane which leads to ‘Redemption’, an extended allegory charting the speaker seeking grace and a new lease from God while ‘The Dawning’ offers a burst of spiritual reawakening with ‘Easter’ triumphantly celebrating the Resurrection.

A selection of Britten’s most poignant folksong arrangements from Vol. 4 of Moore’s Irish Melodies ended a glorious and appealing show with Bevan and Wigglesworth delivering a fine rendering of The Last Rose of Summer capturing the hearts and minds of an appreciative, discerning and attentive audience.

Britten: Young Apollo – Iain Farrington, Britten Sinfonia, Aldeburgh Festival (Photo: Britten Pears Arts)

Directed and led by violinist, Zoë Beyers, the Britten Sinfonia returned in glory to Snape Maltings on the evening of Thursday 18 June delivering one of the finest performances I’ve ever heard from this enlightened and progressive orchestra with their concert opening in a spirited and carefree way with a dazzling and tremendously uplifting performance of Britten’s Young Apollo, a delightful eight-minute piece and one of the few works Britten wrote for piano and orchestra, the commission coming from the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation.

Receiving its first performance in August 1939 on CBC Radio with Britten as the soloist, the work’s characterized by a scintillating opening fanfare followed by a host of rapid, cascading and exciting glissando piano passages cutting through the sweeping heroic textures of the strings comfortably played with flourish, flair and everything else by Iain Farrington who certainly gained the appreciation of a packed house by his outstanding and effortless performance.

John Woolrich’s Ulysses Awakes followed. An adorable six-minute work focusing on Ulysses’ awakening on a shore on the coast of Ithaca, his homeland, far from his beloved Penelope saw Woolrich converting the famous Monteverdi aria into a sorrowful and soulful song for viola that was so richly and rewardingly played by Wenhan Jiang.

A further adorable six-minute piece came along with Charpentier’s ‘Quel prix de mon amour’ (What price has my love) from Médée (1693), set to a text by Thomas Corneille, so eloquently sung by mezzo-soprano, Helen Charlston, who immediately reclaimed centre stage for Haydn’s cantata, Arianna a Naxos, in which her strong-textured and extremely wide-ranging voice comfortably filled Snape Maltings at ease.

This scintillating programme flourished and continued with a ravishing account of Stravinsky’s Apollon musagète, commissioned by the famous Russian impresario, Serge Diaghilev, who described the piece as ‘somehow not of this world but from somewhere else’ witnessing the full forces of the Britten Sinfonia, dynamically led from the violin by Zoë Beyers, playing to their hearts’ content seemingly with no limitations or restraint.

Helen Charlston, Britten Sinfonia, Aldeburgh Festival (Photo: Britten Pears Arts)

The programme ended with Britten’s viscerally powerful Phaedra with the text coming from Jean Racine’s play, Phèdre. Written a year before the composer died, the scenario follows Phaedra’s journey from madness to a final search for purity thus becoming one of Britten’s most emotionally and satisfying pieces.

Once again, Helen Charlston was found performing so well and at the forefront of proceedings of this dramatic cantata telling the tragic mythological story of Phaedra who’s consumed by an incestuous passion for her stepson Hippolytus and her decision to poison herself after false accusations result in his death.

Written for his close friend, Dame Janet Baker, who premièred the work at the 1976 Aldeburgh Festival, Britten modelled the work after Italian baroque cantatas with the score utilizing, of course, a string orchestra but dominant with percussion, too, as well as a continuo of solo cello and harpsichord.

The cantata concludes with a deeply sorrowful and resigned instrumental postlude representing Phaedra’s death and a tragic release from her uncontrollable passions. Standing alone commanding centre stage, Ms Charlston held the curtain for several valuable seconds with the audience totally mesmerised deep in thought. A special moment!

Undisputedly a pioneering and celebrated chamber orchestra headquartered in Cambridge, the Britten Sinfonia was fêted at this year’s Aldeburgh Festival – and deservedly so. Famed for its virtuoso musicianship and bold programming, the orchestra’s immensely good at balancing the familiar classical repertoire with brand-new commissions from the likes of Rufus Wainwright and Joseph Tawadros while maintaining a fierce commitment to local outreach work thereby bringing world-class music directly to schools, hospitals and marginalized communities. Long may it continue – and so say all of us!