For the second year running, there can be no Aldeburgh festival this June. But Britten Pears Arts is continuing the series of weekend concerts at Snape Maltings that it began so successfully during the easing of the lockdown last summer, featuring many of the performers and much of the music that would have been heard had the festivals been able to go ahead.
The latest of these weekends was centred on a residency by the tenor Allan Clayton, who appeared across all three days with his regular recital partner, pianist James Baillieu. Their final concert together was devoted to Britten’s five Canticles, those strange, uncategorisable pieces, neither song cycle nor cantata, that were composed for Peter Pears between 1947 and 1974. The countertenor Feargal Mostyn-Williams joined Clayton for the second, Abraham and Isaac, which began the sequence, and the baritone Roderick Williams made up the trio of singers for the fourth, The Journey of the Magi, which ended it.
But even with the reordering, it proved a rather indigestible hour’s music, drawing attention to the recurring tropes and tics of Britten’s vocal writing that hearing one of the Canticles in the context of a mixed recital would not have emphasised. Had the texts been clearer, it all might have seemed more convincing, too, but words were too often swallowed up by the generous acoustic of the Maltings Concert Hall. The third Canticle, a setting of Edith Sitwell’s Still Falls the Rain (with the horn player Ben Goldscheider) and the fourth, on TS Eliot’s The Death of St Narcissus (with the harpist Olivia Jageurs), were the major casualties, though Clayton’s hushed, tender performance of the first, My Beloved is Mine, and Baillieu’s wonderfully attentive performances of piano parts that Britten wrote for himself to play, were fine compensations.
Running across the weekend also were late-night performances of To and Fro in Shadow – Beckett|Feldman, a pairing of Samuel Beckett’s Not I and Morton Feldman’s Three Voices devised and performed by the soprano Juliet Fraser, and directed by James Macdonald. The torrential outpouring of words in Beckett’s monologue with the auditorium in total darkness save for a single spotlight on Fraser’s mouth, was followed by the looping, mostly wordless repetitions of Feldman’s exquisite piece (composed as a memorial to two friends, the poet Frank O’Hara and the painter Philip Guston), in which a live voice combines with two pre-recorded versions of itself, in an ever shifting tapestry of sounds.
Words (from an O’Hara poem) crystallise out of the textures as the piece goes on, but their meaning always seems just out of reach, the music unresolved. It was a quite tremendous tour de force by Fraser, every element perfectly executed; that the Feldman was mostly illuminated through the window at the back of the Britten Studio by the late-evening midsummer light, complete with a new crescent moon, only enhanced the magic.
