An all-new Aldeburgh

With a new venue and artistic director, this year's Aldeburgh Festival was the start of a fresh era, reports MICHAEL DERVAN.

THE ALDEBURGH FESTIVAL, which ended yesterday, celebrated the rehearsal and performance spaces of its new Hoffmann Building – part of a £16 million (€18.8 million) development project – last weekend by opening with a theatrical Harrison Birtwistle double-bill. In The Corridor, to words by David Harsent, Birtwistle returns to one of his obsessions, the Orpheus myth, exploring the parting after the fatal glance as a linear retreat along the corridor of the title. The other half of the double-bill, Semper Dowland, semper dolens, celebrates the work of one of England's greatest composers John Dowland (c1563-1626), by reworking some of his most famous music in a piece that takes its title from the composer's motto, Always Dowland, always doleful.

Birtwistle wasn’t concerned to add much to Dowland, seeing his role rather as that of a jeweller creating a setting for a treasurable gem. And he has achieved his aim. In the 340-seater Britten Studio, tenor Mark Padmore could sing as lightly as if he were whispering melancholy secrets in your ear. Rarely does the art of singing sound as touchingly personal as this.

Semper Dowland, semper dolens, places its small group of musicians in a line, with two dancers (Helka Kaski and Thom Rackett) flowing through the gamut of relationship situations. The similarly arranged musicians in The Corridor are shades, with whom soprano Elizabeth Atherton's Eurydice enters into dialogue, stepping off the corridor's red strip, and out of character, to reflect on her situation. Mark Padmore's Orpheus is altogether more self-concerned, as if he is the one who is lost.

Birtwistle’s unwinding music doesn’t show the composer at his penetrating best. Yes, there are fine moments, especially in his assertive writing for harp. But, in this spare production by Peter Gill, designed by Alison Chitty, there is not much of the gritty immediacy of the composer’s best work.

Birtwistle featured also in a display-case concert showing off the new building. His tape piece, Chronometer (1971-72), enveloped listeners with impressive thoroughness in the 80-seat Jerwood Kiln Studio, while his Harrison's Clocks(a celebration of the 18th-century clock-maker, John Harrison) was delivered with flighty ease by Japanese pianist Hidéki Nagano in the Britten Studio.

The new buildings are not the only sign of change at Aldeburgh this year. The 2009 programme is the first to bear the fingerprints of the new artistic director, French pianist Pierre-Laurent Aimard. Aimard joined with the members of the Haffner Wind Quintet and the Quatuor Diotima for a collage-montage concert that he offered in the spirit of a game, exploring different composers' approaches to the use of repeated notes, mingling Ländlerby Schubert and melodies from Stockhausen's Tierkreis, creating an Ivesian scherzo in which nothing was by Ives, and compacting excerpts from various works by Ligeti to highlight some of the composer's primary preoccupations.

It’s a good idea to attempt such a radical rethinking of the standard concert format – a bit like creating a wordless radio programme in the concert hall. The outcome, however, was mixed. The juxtaposition of Schubert and Stockhausen was like a combination of culinary genius, bringing together flavours that you wouldn’t expect to work together but actually do. The repeated-note idea fell rather flat, and omitted some of the most obvious candidates for inclusion (pieces by Chopin and Ravel). The Ivesian indulgence was a mess of anything and everything that ended up being nothing. The reduced Ligeti ignored the fact that there are complete works by Ligeti which do the same job perfectly well on their own.

The festival offered other challenges to convention as well. The high-gloss Arcanto Quartet (Antje Weithaas and Daniel Sepec on violins, Tabea Zimmermann on viola, and Jean-Guihen Queyras on cello) offered a three-part concert running from 5.30pm until 10pm, pairing quartets by Haydn with Ravel and Dutilleux, and rounding off with Schubert’s Quintet in C (with cellist Olivier Marron). The Arcanto’s starry line-up is a guarantee of unusual, sometimes mesmerising accomplishments, but the playing at times tilted over into slickness so that one heard the performers first and the music only second.

Aldeburgh is the opposite of hidebound when it comes to repertoire. Just two works in the first five days were from the 19th century. And the Philharmonia Orchestra and its conductor, Vladimir Jurowski, travelled up to Suffolk minus most of its string players, for a concert of wind, brass and percussion music that leapt about between the 16th and 20th centuries. Modern brass instruments are at a disadvantage in the antiphonal music of Giovanni Gabrieli and Ludovico Viadana – the colouring and instrumental weight aren’t quite right.

But Jurowski and his players had a field day in Britten's early Russian Funeral Music(written during a left-wing phase in 1936), and Steven Osborne was a dapper and high- spirited soloist in Stravinsky's Concerto for Piano and Wind Instruments.

Another highlight came at the other end of the scale, in viola-player Tabea Zimmermann’s solo recital, when she included three of György Kurtág’s Signs, Games and Messages, all compact, concentrated, aphoristic statements. Zimmermann offered just three, including one that’s actually named after her. The playing was simply riveting.

The Harrison Birtwistle double-bill is at Queen Elizabeth Hall, London, on July 6 and 7, and Bregenz Festival, Austria, on July 31 and Aug 1