Aldeburgh Festival revives Judith Weir’s creepy opera ‘Blond Eckbert’ — review

In 1948 Benjamin Britten came up with what must have seemed the unlikely idea of starting a music festival at Aldeburgh on the Suffolk coast. Far from any metropolitan area, this was his home and the place that inspired much of his music.

What foresight Britten had: in 1963, he said, “It is the composer’s duty, as a member of society, to speak to or for his fellow human beings.” If he was around now, he would surely approve of music organisations being involved in education and working for the social good, while at the same time the reduction of government funding in those areas would dismay him.

Since that first festival, music in Aldeburgh has grown way beyond his original vision. A capital fund is being raised to refit the much-enlarged campus of buildings for modern use and the remit of Britten Pears Arts now extends to year-round events, an extensive educational programme, music in the community and working with the criminal justice system and those with dementia and Parkinson’s.

Amid all this activity the summer festival stands out as the flagship. This year’s includes a 75th-anniversary concert mirroring the opening of the 1948 festival, a focus on composers Judith Weir and Unsuk Chin and an ongoing commitment to new music with 23 premieres.

The opening night fell to Weir, who is close to completing her term as Master of the King’s Music. The festival’s main venue, the Maltings at Snape, hosted a new production of her opera Blond Eckbert (1993). At its premiere the opera came across as an intriguingly dark folk tale in the Brothers Grimm tradition, albeit on the short side. Now she has trimmed it further. Blink and you miss it?

Weir’s telling, derived from Ludwig Tieck, focuses on a couple whose life together is disrupted by the arrival of a friend of the husband. The visitor suspiciously seems to know a lot about the wife’s history and that past is a place where an alarming secret is hidden. The encounter leads to a violent outcome.

The claustrophobic intimacy of the story is heightened here by the use of Weir’s revised, “pocket” version of the score, which is on a smaller scale. The full orchestra of the English National Opera premiere is replaced by an ensemble of 10 instruments, their lean, sharp-edged sound capturing the tight-knit tensions and psychological anxieties in the score.

Although an eerily romantic backdrop of Germany’s Harz mountains looms over the production, director Robin Norton-Hale sets the tale in the present day, showing an ordinary couple in an ordinary, modern house struggling with out-of-the-ordinary revelations. An adequate cast includes Simon Wallfisch in the title role, Flora McIntosh as his wife Berthe, William Morgan as the friend Walther and Aoife Miskelly as the magical bird who serves as narrator. Gerry Cornelius is the conductor.

There are Wagnerian allusions aplenty here (a singing woodbird, an incestuous couple, an all-knowing visitor), but any comparable teasing out of the import of the myth is missing. At the end Blond Eckbert stops abruptly, the narrative concluded, its meaning unexplored. Why did we need to see this tale? What do these people have to say to us? We never quite know.

★★★☆☆

Another festival theme is the song cycles of Messiaen, occupying three afternoon recitals. These promise to be Messiaen performances with a difference, tapping into the composer’s exceptional identification of music with colour, which led him to associate certain chords and even rhythmic patterns with colours of their own.

Each of the song cycles is being presented in conjunction with artwork by Rachel Jones, projected as moving abstract images on a panoramic screen. The first of the cycles was the expansive hymn to love Harawi, and the rich visual colours reflected Messiaen’s saturated harmonies with kaleidoscopic intensity, even if it was hard to follow how the trajectories of art and music fitted together in any detail.

The songs call for a “grand dramatic voice”, in Messiaen’s words, and Gweneth-Ann Jeffers fitted the bill, filling the Britten Studio with sound and capturing the passion and ferocity of this challenging cycle to the coruscating accompaniment of pianist Simon Lepper.

★★★★☆

Festival runs to June 23, brittenpearsarts.org