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| Colin Matthews |
Whilst most people are still frantically planning for Christmas, the good folk at Britten Pears Arts are thinking much further ahead and have announced the highlights of the 2025 Aldeburgh Festival which runs from 13 to 29 June 2025.
The Festival opens with the world premiere of Colin Matthews’ new opera A Visit to Friends, with a libretto by William Boyd. An opera about love. Or, more accurately, about love’s frustrations. Drawing on Anton Chekhov’s short story and William Boyd’s Chekhovian play LONGING, A Visit to Friends is, beguilingly, an opera within an opera, with music strongly influenced by Scriabin. Additionally, there will be a reading of Chekhov’s short story that inspired the opera in the enchanting woodland setting of Thorington Theatre.
Colin Matthews’ links to the festival go back to the 1970s when he worked at Aldeburgh with Benjamin Britten and Imogen Holst, and he was was Chair of the Britten Estate for many years, and is Joint President of Britten-Pears Arts. Other Colin Matthews’ works in this festival include String Quartet No. 6 with the Gildas Quartet, and Paraphrases written for featured artist Leila Josefowicz alongside brothers Paul and Huw Watkins, plus a new orchestration of Debussy’s Images (Book 2) performed in the final concert of the 2025 Aldeburgh Festival by the London Symphony Orchestra and Sir Antonio Pappano.
Four featured artists – tenor Allan Clayton, violinist Leila Josefowicz, and composers Helen Grime and Daniel Kidane – are at the heart of this year’s programme.
Clayton joins the Knussen Chamber Orchestra and conductor Ryan Wigglesworth to perform Clayton’s favourite Britten song cycle – Nocturne, and with the BBC Symphony Orchestra and Sakari Oramo he performs Britten’s Our Hunting Fathers, and with Antonio Pappano at the piano he performs Britten’s Seven Sonnets of Michaelangelo plus Vaughan Williams’ On Wenlock Edge with members of the LSO. With Edward Gardner and the Royal Academy of Music Symphony Orchestra he performs Mark-Anthony Turnage’s Refugee – written for him – with texts by Emily Dickinson, Benjamin Zephaniah, W.H. Auden and Brian Bilston. The Dunedin Consort and Clayton combine new and old in a programme including the first performance of a Britten Pears Arts commission by Tom Coult based on the text of the Lamentations of Jeremiah.
Helen Grime’s Festival residency offers a chance to hear a wide range of work including her string quartets from the Heath and Fibonacci Quartets, her Violin Concerto from Leila Josefowicz and the BBC Symphony Orchestra and Sakari Oramo, and i written for Knussen’s 60th birthday in 2012, heard next year again from the BBC SO and Oramo. Grime’s
new song cycle for soprano and orchestra Folk, which draws on the folklore of the Isle of Man, was written for soprano Claire Booth – who had the idea for the piece – and she performs it with the Knussen Chamber Orchestra and conductor Ryan Wigglesworth. Other Grime works in the festival include her Missa Brevis at the Festival Service and her cello solo, Harp of North inspired by lines from Walter Scott’s folk-inflected poem The Lady of the Lake.
Daniel Kidane’s orchestral work Sirens, a collaboration with Zimbabwean writer and poet Zodwa Nyoni, is performed by Edward Gardner and the Royal Academy of Music Symphony Orchestra, his work for the Last Night of the Proms in 2019, Awake, is performed by the BBC Symphony Orchestra and Sakari Oramo, Royal College of Music Symphony Orchestra and Kirill Karabits are joined by YCAT artist, Sphinx Prize winner and Classic FM Rising Star Nathan Amaral to perform Kidane’s violin concerto Aloud. Tenor Nick Pritchard and pianist Ian Tindale perform Kidane’s Songs of Illumination, pianist Mishka Rushdie Momen performs Kidane’s Three Etudes inspired by a Kandinsky painting, Carducci Quartet gives the first performance of Daniel Kidane’s new String Quartet – a Britten Pears Arts Commission, BBC Singers and Sofi Jeannin perform his lockdown piece The Song Thrush and the Mountain Ash, with text set by Simon Armitage, Alisa Weilerstein’s solo cello recital includes Daniel Kidane’s Sarabande Parts 1 – 3, and the Festival Service includes his Christus factus est.
Leila Josefowicz makes her Aldeburgh Festival and Snape Maltings debut, and she performs Helen Grime’s Violin Concerto, and is joined by brothers Huw and Paul Watkins, for a chamber concert that includes the world premiere of Colin Matthews’ Paraphrases, written especially for her, plus The Psychology of Performance where Leila Josefowicz leads a fascinating study of topics such as stage anxiety, interpretation from a non-musical point of view, and other matters to do with performance.
Full details from the festival website, and the festival brochure is also available online.
