Aldeburgh Festival

[1][2] Their work with the English Opera Group (which they had founded with designer John Piper in 1947) frequently took them away from home, and it was while they were on tour in Switzerland with Albert Herring and The Rape of Lucretia in August of that year, that Peter Pears said "Why not make our own Festival?

However, the lack of a large venue was holding back the further development of the festival until one of the largest mid-nineteenth century maltings in East Anglia, at Snape, a village just outside Aldeburgh, became available.

[5] Concert goers were over the ensuing years to see new works not only by Britten himself, but by composers such as Lennox Berkeley, Richard Rodney Bennett, Elliott Carter, Hans Werner Henze, Alfred Schnittke, Toru Takemitsu, Michael Tippett, Mark-Anthony Turnage and Malcolm Williamson, many of whom came to the Festival as composer-in-residence.

Imogen Holst introduced early choral music, and soon works by European composers rarely heard at that time in England were in the repertoire, such as Berg, Mahler, Schoenberg, Poulenc, Boulez, and Webern.

In contrast, John Dankworth and Cleo Laine, Joyce Grenfell, Peggy Ashcroft and actors from the Royal Shakespeare Company made regular appearances; Princess Grace of Monaco came to take part in a poetry recital.

There was a strong connection with Russian music: Rostropovich and Richter became frequent visitors, and in 1970 Shostakovich's 14th Symphony, dedicated to Britten, had its first performance outside the USSR at the Concert Hall.

[6] Janet Baker, Julian Bream, Osian Ellis, Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau, John Shirley-Quirk and Robert Tear were among the regular performers in the early days, followed later by Alfred Brendel, Ian Bostridge, Thomas Allen, Philip Langridge and Ann Murray.

The 2012 Festival had Oliver Knussen as Artist in Residence, and the typically eclectic programme[8] included new productions of Knussen's Where the Wild Things Are and Higglety Pigglety Pop!, a concert series exploring the work of Helmut Lachenmann, recitals by Menahem Pressler, Ian Bostridge, Peter Serkin, Miklós Perényi, Dezső Ránki and the Arditti and Keller Quartets, the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra with the UK premiere of a work by Elliott Carter, as well as dramatised performances with film at the Leiston Long Shop Museum, the complete screening with live accompaniment of Britten's 1930s film scores, a promenade performance of John Cage's Song Books in the Hoffmann Building under the banner of #Faster than Sound, and open-air community events on Aldeburgh Beach.

It has seen the premieres of several works by Britten (A Midsummer Night's Dream in 1960; Death in Venice in 1973) and also Harrison Birtwistle's Punch and Judy in 1968, The Io Passion in 2004, The Corridor in 2009 and The Cure in 2015.