A BRISK northerly chilled the east coast, but the heat was on in the music-making until the very last note had sounded at this year’s Aldeburgh Festival. Thomas Adès, the festival’s artistic director, conducted the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra in the grand finale at Snape Maltings: an arresting juxtaposition of Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring and Tchaikovsky’s Pathétique Symphony. Not the pieces that festival-goers would have chosen, perhaps, for their last afternoon of sun and sea. But Adès, with his keen composer’s ear, had striking revelations to make about two works written just 20 years apart, and both obsessed with the notion of sacrifice.
Stravinsky seemed at his most sensuous in the acoustic of the Maltings, but the Tchaikovsky was the master performance. Nothing was taken as read; everything was deconstructed and reconstructed, with a sombre and sure sense of the work’s structure heading for descent into destruction.
Adès had appeared the day before as composer and pianist. The excellent Ulysses Ensemble (young alumni of Aldeburgh residencies this year and last) included his brilliantly teasing Catch for piano, violin, cello and peripatetic clarinet in their afternoon concert of Beethoven, Schoenberg and Crumb at Aldeburgh Church.
And Adès enjoyed a solo spot that evening in his Snape Maltings recital with the tenor Ian Bostridge. He played Prokofiev’s Sarcasms: five sharp-toothed outbursts, their volatile tones of voice captured with frightening panache in Adès’s fingers.
He was a startlingly astute accompanist, too, in songs from Wolf’s Spanisches Liederbuch and Schubert’s Schwanen- gesang. All of Bostridge’s intelligence and intense vocal focus homed in on the Wolf. Schubert, though deeper in his system, revealed signs of a disconcerting physical and vocal contortion, threatening to undermine what are always intellectually compelling performances.
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With a certain creative numbness in Alfred Brendel’s Snape evening of variation and fantasy in the music of Mozart, Schumann, Schubert and Haydn, it was really not the big shots who fired this final week of the festival. The sparks flew from the young. Nowhere more so than in the Trio Fibonacci’s last-minute concert, in Blythburgh Church, of music by Jonathan Harvey. The hour of instrumental and taped music, including the haunting Flight-Elegy for violin and piano, and the exuberant Tombeau de Messiaen for piano and tape, was one of the most memorable of the festival.