Next year Aldeburgh will be in safe hands
Michael White on the Aldeburgh Festival and Covent Garden's revival of Ariadne auf Naxos
27 June 2008

Of all the festivals that keep a critic busy through the summer, the one I'd truly miss if it weren't there isn't Bayreuth, Salzburg or any of the other dizzily exalted Rolex dates but cool, clear-headed Aldeburgh which, on a bright day when the sea sparkles, the gulls cry, and festival stalwarts file along the High Street to a morning concert in the parish church or pile on to the bus for an afternoon recital at Snape Maltings, feels like God's gift to civilisation.

With its atmosphere of crisply English pleasure and tradition of high-minded programming, Aldeburgh is precious in the best sense of that word. It matters. Which means that the passing of the artistic directorship next year from British composer Thomas Ades to French pianist Pierre-Laurent Aimard matters too. We need to know the job is in the right hands. And to that end, the 2008 festival took pains to give Aimard plenty of profile, including a Snape concert in the opening weekend designed to show us what to expect.

Aimard is a polymath with wide repertory interests but a particular approach to music-making: curious, investigative, like a younger-generation Boulez but without the attitude. And this concert, in which he conducted the Britten Sinfonia as well as played piano, said it all just from the content. Starting with a Haydn symphony, it passed through miniatures by Schoenberg, Kurtag, Webern and Charles Ives, then (after the interval) finished with a Mozart piano concerto. Strange or what?

In fact it worked bizarrely well, and like a lesson in listening. Where Haydn symphonies at the start of concerts are usually a chance to settle down before the real stuff begins, this one was rigorous, emphatic, demanding of attention. And the miniatures that followed were spell-binding.

That Aimard's Mozart at the end was too frenetic (and clumsy) to be credible was disappointing: there are things that even polymaths can't do. But overall this was a classic Aldeburgh night and part of a classic Aldeburgh weekend that included Robert Hollingworth's vocal group I Fagiolini recreating a complete 16th-century Mass (the Byrd four-part) with Latin Propers, Gospel and Epistle in the parish church (something that can't have happened there for a while, still less on a Saturday morning), and a magnificent Schubert recital in Blythburgh Church by the gloriously lugubrious Robert Holl.

Regrettably, the weekend started with a new opera entitled An Ocean of Rain that no one in the audience could make any sense of - partly because it was so crudely amplified that none of the text registered, but also because the piece itelf made no attempt to project coherence. Set in Haiti, it had something to do with a prostitute who sets herself on fire but doesn't die, and three western women who may/may not be lesbian sex-tourists and do die (probably God's wrath at work). Beyond this, I was stumped - and stupefied by the music of Yannis Kyriakides, the young Cypriot composer, which at best had a seductive, atmospheric melacholy but at worst (which was rather more of the time) drifted shapelessly along like white noise, vaguely echoing the rhythms of the vocal writing in a way that only made it more obscure. It transfers next month to the Almeida, London, but I wouldn't rush.

Some years ago I went to New York to interview the singer Deborah Voigt, in the course of which she told me - casually and without rancour - that she'd been asked to step down from a pending production at Covent Garden because she'd put on too much weight to get into the black dress that was her costume. I mentioned this in my piece (who wouldn't?) and the story spread like fire, with "Fat Soprano Banned from Opera" headlines in the tabloids.

Fortunately, Voigt is not a prickly prima donna and could laugh about it. Which is why, years later, she's now at Covent Garden in a revival of that same production, Ariadne auf Naxos, and wearing the dress - having slimmed down spectacularly in the intervening time. And I wish I could say her delayed arrival in the role is the triumph everyone deserves after the long wait. Voigt is one of the world's leading Strauss sopranos: we were hoping for great things here. But they didn't quite emerge.

She is undoubtedly a great performer, with a radiant personality and quick intelligence that delivers the comedy in this opera about putting on an opera with finesse. And in her slimmed-down form she handles the last half hour, where romantic fantasy takes over and Strauss engulfs the stage with the most shamelessly voluptuous indulgences he ever wrote, with total credibility.

But the voice? It wasn't up to past form. The velvet richness I remember has become metallic, hard-edged. Or at least, it was on this first night. What's happened? Did she need the weight to make the sound? I don't know; but I could have cried, and might have done but for the fact that there are other joys in the production (Kristine Jepson as the Composer, Gillian Keith a charmingly waif-like Zerbinetta) and enough to admire in Mark Elder's conducting. Or Sir Mark as he now is, pretty belatedly as well.