Spitalfields manages to be literally parochial — exploring, as it does, the multi-ethnic culture of the Christ Church parish (this year emphasising the Irish element) — while always pursuing both new music and the pre-classical, chiefly choral, repertoire to which the church acoustics are so hospitable. Aldeburgh refuses to let itself become a shrine for its founder, Britten, or the centre of a Suffolk landscape or history cult (though disdaining neither role), and puts on some of the most interesting programmes to be found anywhere.
Both festivals furnish a detailed, scholarly programme book that lends the diverse items an instant, if only typographic, unity, but the musical vision is in each case real. What sets the festivals apart is budget. Spitalfields can no longer afford orchestras and opera productions, but Aldeburgh, which ends today with a concert by the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra, also hosted the BBC Symphony Orchestra, the London Sinfonietta and Northern Sinfonia, and presented two operas. Spitalfields reached its climax with Jonathan Dove’s ambitious new community cantata, the reflexive On Spital Fields. But Spitalfields’s pleasures are no less keen for being modest-scaled.
It was a delight, for instance, to catch the RTE Vanbrugh Quartet playing Tippett and late Beethoven, with a work by the Irish composer Jane O’Leary, in the intimacy of Wilton’s Music Hall, the most expressively dilapidated building in London. It was fascinating to hear Diana Burrell’s new Terce, for the unprecedented mixture of organ (David Titterington) and accordion (Ian Watson) in the lunchtime serenity of the Dutch Church; and gratifying to find that the Judith Weir commission performed by Andrew Carwood’s Cardinall’s Musick at Christ Church should be such a gem. A seven-minute, a cappella triptych of George Herbert settings, Vertue recrystallises the subtle verses with touchingly deceptive directness.
Aldeburgh’s second weekend included “electronica” from the Sinfonietta at the Pumphouse, a tiny, fringe-of-the-marshes venue; a Jubilee Hall survey of modern Danish work by the Kroger String Quartet, who premiered Poul Ruders’s rather long Quintet for String Quartet and Accordion (that instrument again); a marvellous talk there by Neil Powell on the Aldeburgh poet George Crabbe; and Birtwistle’s substantial new Neruda Madrigales, unveiled at Snape Maltings by the Sinfonietta and BBC Singers under Nicholas Kok. For its recherché combi- nation of four flutes, four clarinets, harp, percussion and cimbalom, Tansy Davies also wrote a work, Spine, which made an attractive appetiser to the big but digestible Birtwistle meal.
And a word for the BBCSO Maltings programme devised by Oliver Knussen, who was unable to conduct it. His own Flourish with Fireworks, Stravinsky’s Fireworks and Colin Matthews’s new Fanfare and Flourish with Fireflies formed a dazzling triptych of scherzos, conducted brilliantly by the young Edward Gardner. The succeeding account of Tippett’s Symphony No2, so fiendish to play, was absolutely heartwarming.