Good music festivals start well but end amazingly, and Aldeburgh – the best of music festivals – ended last week with something that amazed, disturbed and overwhelmed, packing so visceral a punch it felt like being flattened by a bus.
It was perhaps the greatest of all Britten’s operas Billy Budd: a Christian myth to the extent that it depicts a world (the self-contained world of a ship at sea) rescued from evil by the sacrifice of a young innocent whose death brings cleansing and catharsis. Britten wrote it on an epic scale that calls for a testosterone-fuelled all-male chorus and orchestral forces too big for an Aldeburgh venue to attempt a full production – which is why the festival had never done it until now. And it was only playing at Snape Maltings in a concert staging, reworked from an Opera North show that first played in Leeds.
