Britten-Pears Art
Britten’s got talent…
As the Britten-Pears Young Artist Programme celebrates its 50th anniversary, Tom Stewart speaks to past and present staff and students
In October 1976, the tenor Peter Pears was in Canada to perform music by Benjamin Britten, his partner of 37 years. Midway through a newspaper interview, the phone rang. The news from Suffolk was bad: Britten, just 62 but with a failing heart, was fading quickly. As it was, he would be dead before Christmas. ‘The festival is secure, thank God. The big push now is to get the study centre at Aldeburgh properly established,’ Pears told the reporter after hanging up. It was, he said, ‘Ben’s greatest wish’.
Known today as the Britten-Pears Young Artist Programme (BPYAP), the ‘study centre’ started life in 1972, when nine singers were invited to Snape Maltings to take part in a masterclass given by Pears alongside his teacher Lucie Manen. The following 50 years have seen musicians at the beginnings of their (very often illustrious) careers come to Aldeburgh to experiment, collaborate and take risks outside the hierarchical structures of music college. BPYAP has evolved away from the confines of the masterclass format in which it began, when Pears guided the students with patrician charm through music by Schubert, Purcell and, of course, Britten. Today, it comprises courses for instrumentalists, singers and composers, as well as residencies for chamber music groups. Everything is offered free of charge, with transport and accommodation costs covered too.
‘It’s a testament to the opportunities we get from Britten-Pears that we’re performing major roles at a venue like this,’ says current Britten-Pears young artist Jolyon Loy, who will make his debut at the Royal Opera House (ROH) Linbury Theatre in November. British baritone Loy takes up the role of Tarquinius in Britten’s second opera, The Rape of Lucretia, alongside singers from BPYAP and the ROH Jette Parker Artists Programme, with performances at Snape Maltings at the end of October before the production transfers to Covent Garden. ‘Every company is waiting for a sign from someone else that they should take the risk and employ you,’ Loy continues. ‘Without a chance like this, it’s just so hard to break through.’
New Zealand baritone Kieran Rayner stars alongside Loy as Junius, and agrees with his assessment. ‘Once you’re at the stage where you’re working in the industry, everyone can do it, so something really special has to happen to get you noticed,’ he says. Both singers first came to BPYAP to take part in a semi-staged production of Handel’s opera Theodora, directed by Sarah Connolly. ‘It was one of the most fun and enriching things I’ve ever done,’ says Loy. ‘Straight away, it didn’t feel like a company putting on a young artist programme because it makes them look good. You could really tell that they wanted to engage and develop young talent.’ For Rayner, it was the strength of Connolly’s personality that made the experience so valuable. ‘She is a force of nature,’ he says. ‘You could feel so many cogs turning all the time – it was awe-inspiring being able to watch her work.’
‘It’s due to Britten-Pears that we’re performing major Royal Opera roles’
By 1972, Britten’s dwindling energies were directed into completing late masterpieces such as the opera Death in Venice, the cantata Phaedra and his Third String Quartet. He supported young artists, composers especially, throughout his life, though gave few formal lessons. Pears, on the other hand, began teaching at the Dartington Music School in Devon in the early 1950s. On holiday with the cellist Mstislav Rostropovich and soprano Galina Vishnevskaya in 1965, Pears was cajoled by them into signing a playful contract: ‘I, Peter Pears, agree to open a music school,’ it read, ‘starting with a Summer School, and eventually for the whole year, not later than August 1966’. It took a little longer than that, but things had been set in motion.
‘Britten wasn’t hugely involved,’ says the composer’s biographer Paul Kildea, who was Aldeburgh Festival director of programming between 1999 and 2002. ‘But he wanted Pears, who was a really good teacher, to cut down on the travelling and to have something to do once he stopped singing.’ The purpose-built Britten-Pears School for Advanced Musical Studies opened in 1979, paid for by a national drive in Britten’s memory, and a stroke brought down the curtain on Pears’s performing career the following year. He continued to teach, however, until shortly before his death six years later.
Kildea’s arrival in Aldeburgh came a year after Thomas Adès was appointed its artistic director. With Aldeburgh Music’s then chief executive Jonathan Reekie, they set about integrating the young artist programme deeper into the festival structure. ‘The festival after Pears died was a duumvirate of [composer] Ollie Knussen and [conductor] Steuart Bedford, and a balancing act between their different ideas and the young artist scheme was not the highest priority,’ Kildea recalls. ‘What changed was the ambition; we didn’t just think of it as a bunch of these postgrad students coming together for a laugh.’ No one would accuse Britten – aman of exacting tastes and occasionally brutal tendencies – of doing anything ‘for a laugh’. Pears, perhaps the warmer character, was equally clear-headed, and the enterprising spirit of today’s BPYAP ref lects its founders’ high standards, enthusiasm and drive.
In 2003, the Britten-Pears School for Advanced Musical Studies was reborn as the Britten Pears Young Artist Programme and began to take its present shape, with courses offered throughout the year. These often involve high-profile performances at Snape Maltings, including at the main Aldeburgh Festival each June. ‘All of a sudden, we started putting on things like a performance of Mahler’s Second Symphony at the Easter festival, which was incredibly ambitious,’ Kildea recalls. His final BPYAP event was a production of Britten’s Albert Herring starring tenor Allan Clayton, who was then just 24. ‘It was always so fun – we called it Britney-Spears, not Britten-Pears. There was such a sense of camaraderie, an explosion of goodwill. Everyone loved doing it.’
Although singers and pianists were the initial focus of educational activities at Snape Maltings, violist Cecil Aronowitz was appointed in 1975 to establish the Snape Maltings Chamber Orchestra, later the Britten-Pears Orchestra, as part of the programme for young artists. Violinist Maggie Faultless, who today leads the Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment (OAE), first came to Aldeburgh in the early 1980s for a piano trio course. ‘After that I played in performances of Britten’s opera Owen Wingrave and Bach’s St Matthew Passion,’ she says. ‘These experiences rooted me in the beauty of the surroundings at Aldeburgh – the gentleness and strength, which are also things people find in Britten’s music.’ Since then, Faultless has returned to the scheme as a tutor of Baroque performance, and with her OAE colleagues for an artistic development residency alongside the Freiburg Baroque Orchestra. Having such a long relationship with the scheme, she says, reinforces the unique feeling of community.
‘There’s nowhere else, certainly no secular place, that gives you the same sense that you’re part of the thread of history,’ Faultless continues, explaining that BPYAP’s setting is unique for the sense of the past it contains. ‘You get it walking around Westminster Abbey, knowing that Handel and Purcell worked there, but at Aldeburgh it isn’t just Snape Maltings, or the Red House; it’s the people, the town and the landscape that surrounds them. I know people who go to Banff [in the Canadian Rockies] describe something similar: the combination of gentleness, openness and the power of landscape.’
‘Nowhere else gives you the same sense that you’re part of the thread of history’
Like Faultless, Royal College of Music (RCM) composition student Jasmine Morris was struck by the setting when she joined the scheme in 2021. But, as she explains, it wasn’t the famous pebble beach that inspired her chamber opera, nor the whistling reeds that surround Snape Maltings. ‘I saw these funny igloo-like structures all over the place but didn’t know what they were,’ she says, describing the corrugated iron huts that litter the muddy pig farms spread all over East Anglia. Morris’s opera, a retelling of George Orwell’s Animal Farm that took this strange feature of the landscape as a starting point, was performed at this year’s Aldeburgh festival alongside creations by other young artists. ‘We had the freedom to come up with whatever ideas we wanted,’ she explains. ‘They gave us the resources we needed – expert tutors, practical support – but it was up to us to figure out how to put everything together.’
The first composers joined BPYAP in 1992, under the guidance of Knussen, who had been Britten’s only real student, and Colin Matthews, his musical assistant during the 1970s. Almost three decades later, the scheme offered Morris an opportunity to take a big creative risk – writing a new opera that physically leads its audience through a number of different rooms – by putting in place what she describes as ‘a safety net, in case we fell short’. As part of the same year-long course, Rayner and fellow Britten-Pears young artist Lotte Betts-Dean gave a recital of songs by Finzi, Poulenc and Schubert that changed course each time they performed it according to votes cast by the audience. ‘I wanted to give them some agency in what they heard,’ he says. ‘We had great feedback, and the scheme gave me the opportunity to turn something that had only ever existed in my head into reality on stage.’
Britten, Kildea writes in the final pages of his 2013 biography, brought British music ‘far closer to the to the Continental model of training and performance he admired in his youth and thought lacking in more slapdash Britain.’ The composer’s exacting, entrepreneurial spirit lives on in the Britten-Pears Young Artist Programme, as it does in the Aldeburgh Festival and, of course, the music he wrote. The pedagogical warmth and dedication the programme embodies owe more to Pears, however, and those who have followed in his wake. But whatever the origins of the Britten-Pears flame, voices from the programme’s past and present make clear that it burns no less bright today than it did at that first masterclass 50 years ago.
Youthful ditties
Benjamin Britten’s dedication to education can be seen in the numerous works he composed for children – all of them notable in their sophisticated refusal to write ‘down’ for his young performers. Choral works include Friday Afternoons – 12 song settings composed for the pupils of Clive House School in Wales where his brother was headmaster – and A Ceremony of Carols for soprano or treble choir, split into three parts. His operas Peter Grimes, The Turn of the Screw and Owen Wingrave also include parts for children – and, of course, his Young Person’s Guide to the Orchestra is a perennial favourite of budding audiences.
From beer to there
Snape Maltings reborn
In Britain at least, no composer and place are more closely entwined than Britten and the Suffolk coast. Born in Lowestoft, he moved with Pears to the seaside town of Aldeburgh (which had already lost much of its seagoing grit) in 1947. The first Aldeburgh Festival took place the following June, when Britten was 34 and Pears 37. A few miles inland, the derelict buildings at Snape Maltings – where barley had once taken the first steps towards becoming beer – were transformed into a concert hall two decades later and remain the headquarters of Aldeburgh Music to this day.
Britten left £100,000 (more than £800,000 today) in his will to the Britten-Pears School of Advanced Musical Studies. The subsequent appeal for funds to convert an old grain store at Snape into its permanent home raised more than five times that amount: then, as now, the Arts Council along with foundations and donors helped make up the difference. Local friends of the festival have long put up visiting artists, but the 2008 purchase of Elizabeth Court – 16 studio flats in the centre of Aldeburgh – has since provided many with a home during their time with BPYAP.