Summary

Britten Sinfonia return to Aldeburgh Festival, with a programme studded with surprising and colourful gems conducted by Oliver Knussen. Beethoven’s light and brilliant Eighth and Mozart’s grand, elegiac miniature are reminders never to typecast these great, multifaceted composers. Both Matthews’ and Carter’s pieces resonate with the Mozart – Night Music in its mood of slow grandeur and A Sunbeam’s Architecture in the echoes of war and death that tinge the poems of E.E. Cummings, written during WWI, which Carter sets in his song cycle. Tippett’s Concerto for Orchestra, meanwhile, stands out as a work of remarkable originality and colour.