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My name is Ben Hogwood, editor of the Arcana music site (arcana.fm)

News – 77th Aldeburgh Festival 2026 – Programme announced

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published by Ben Hogwood from the original press release. Photo above (c) unknown

The programme for the 77th Aldeburgh Festival takes place from Friday 12 to Sunday 28 June. Aldeburgh Festival has always been a place where music is made in full view of its past and its future; where composers, performers and audiences meet in the “holy triangle” Britten believed was essential to artistic life. In 2026, fifty years since Britten’s death, Britten Pears Arts reaffirms that principle as a living manifesto. 1976 marked an ending, but also a beginning: the moment the care, curiosity and exacting standards Britten and Pears brought to nurturing young artists became the enduring thread of the Festival and this organisation’s identity.

The 2026 Festival convenes artists who know one another’s work deeply—musicians who share a language of trust, risk and detail. Featured Artist Ryan Wigglesworth leads a circle of collaborators including Vilde Frang, Sophie Bevan, Steven Osborne, Lawrence Power and Nicolas Altstaedt. They come not simply to perform, but to pass on what they have learned: forming chamber groups, standing side by side with young players, and allowing music to reveal its meaning through shared attention.

In 2026 James Baillieu and Ryan Wigglesworth begin a 3-year tenure as Associate Directors of the Britten Pears Young Artist Programme. The aim is to build academies in which young, aspiring artists can flourish alongside their mentors and be celebrated in Aldeburgh Festival programmes, and to consider how important this venture is at a difficult time for the arts.

At the heart of this commitment is the new Festival Academy, directed by James Baillieu with Lise Davidsen, Caroline Dowdle, Julia Faulkner and Nicky Spence as faculty. Their work, and the Summer Academy that will follow it for instrumentalists and led by Ryan Wigglesworth, continues the legacy Britten and Pears established and marks a new way for the Young Artist Programme to work, enabling young artists to flourish when surrounded by the very best musicians, challenged, nurtured and invited to experience the generosity of audiences at Snape Maltings.

Pelléas et Mélisande, directed by Rory Kinnear with designs by Vicki Mortimer and lighting by Paule Constable, and performed by Sophie Bevan, Sarah Connolly, Jacques Imbrailo, Gordon Bintner, John Tomlinson and alumni of the Britten Pears Young Artist Programme, opens the festival with a work of delicacy and depth. Alongside Britten’s own late works, music by Feldman, Crumb, Kurtág and Henze sits beside 11 new works by Lera Auerbach, Tom Coult, Tansy Davies, Brett Dean, Lisa Illean, Natalie Joachim, Freya Waley-Cohen, Ryan Wigglesworth and others, maintaining Britten Pears Arts’ commitment to the composers of today and the artists who bring their work to life.

Andrew Comben, Chief Executive, Britten Pears Arts commented, ‘Aldeburgh Festival 2026 draws its joy from the energy of the musicians who gather here and the future they help reveal. At the heart of this is Ryan Wigglesworth, who I’m delighted to welcome as this year’s Featured Artist. His long association with the Festival will be reflected in performances as conductor, pianist and composer, joined by many of his closest artistic collaborators. 2026 marks fifty years since the death of our Founder, Benjamin Britten. His and Peter Pears’ commitment to supporting young artists remains central to our purpose, and the Festival and Summer Academies – led by James Baillieu and Ryan Wigglesworth – strengthen that legacy by placing outstanding young performers alongside world-class musicians as a core part of our programming. The Festival opens with a semi-staging of Debussy’s Pelléas et Mélisande, with an all-star cast and creative team, followed by a wide-ranging programme of opera, orchestras, choirs, chamber music, song, film, talks, walks and a fascinating visual arts programme featuring Ryan Gander, Ffiona Lewis and Kate Giles. Set across Snape Maltings, Aldeburgh and other Suffolk locations it continues to offer a beguiling combination of music, landscape and creative possibility. We really look forward to welcoming everyone in June.’

Ryan Wigglesworth this year’s Featured Artist commented, ‘Making music at Snape Maltings over the past 25 years has been one of the great pleasures of my life. From the start, it felt like home – a place where the most important friendships were forged, a place to grow and develop artistically. So, the invitation to be “Featured Artist” for the 2026 Aldeburgh Festival was a very special and joyous privilege. A strong sense of “family” has always been central to the spirit of the Aldeburgh Festival and accounts for why so many musicians feel drawn to put down artistic roots here. And what bliss it has been programming concerts involving so many of my dearest friends and colleagues:

Nicolas Altstaedt, Sophie Bevan (literally family!), Sarah Connolly, Jacques Imbrailo, Rory Kinnear, Vicki Mortimer, Steven Osborne, Lawrence Power, John Tomlinson, as well as all the members of the two orchestras I’m lucky to be associated with: the BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra and the Knussen Chamber Orchestra. (the latter itself a legacy of my “thanks-to-Snape” friendship with the late, deeply missed Oliver Knussen). It allows me the rare opportunity to wear all my hats under one roof, as it were: playing chamber music and song, premiering my new piece for Lawrence Power and the KCO, and conducting works that mean a great deal to me personally – none more so than Debussy’s Pelléas et Mélisande. It really is a great honour.’

James Baillieu, Associate Director, Britten Pears Young Artist Programme commented, ‘I am deeply honoured and delighted to be appointed, alongside Ryan Wigglesworth, as Associate Directors of the Britten Pears Young Artist Programme for 2026–2028. The Britten Pears Programme played a formative role in my own development as a young artist, and it is a profound privilege to return in this new capacity to contribute to its future. This appointment represents a deeply meaningful opportunity to help nurture the next generation of musicians within the creative and inspiring context that Britten and Pears established. I am excited to bring my experience, connections, and ideas to the role, and to be part of an ambitious new chapter in the life of this distinguished programme.’

To read the complete listings, head to the Aldeburgh Festival website

Published post no.2,731 – Thursday 27 November 2025

In concert – Ryan Wang, CBSO / Pierre Bleuse: Ravel, Liszt & Bartók

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Ryan Wang (piano), City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra / Pierre Bleuse

Ravel Ma mère l’Oye – ballet (1910-11); Rapsodie Espagole ((1907-08)
Liszt Piano Concerto no.1 in E flat major S124 (1849, rev. 1855)
Bartók The Miraculous Mandarin BB82 – suite (1918-24)

Symphony Hall, Birmingham
Thursday 4 December 2025

Reviewed by Richard Whitehouse Photo of Pierre Bleuse (c) Marine Pierrot Detry

His marking the centenaries of Berio and Boulez at this year’s Proms confirmed Pierre Bleuse (music director of the Ensemble Intercontemporain) as a conducting force to be reckoned with, duly reaffirmed by this afternoon’s concert with the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra.

The CBSO has an association with the ballet incarnation of Ravel’s Mother Goose stretching to Simon Rattle and beyond to Louis Frémaux. After an evocative Prelude then a winningly nonchalant Spinning-Wheel Dance, Bleuse (above) brought out the plaintiveness in Pavane of the Sleeping Beauty’ then the subtly nuanced humour in Conversation of Beauty and the Beast; pointing up the piquancy of Tom Thumb then the whimsicality of Laideronnette, Empress of the Pagodas. Interpretively as well as musically, the best was saved until last – the deftest of transitions leading into a Fairy Garden of artless eloquence. Throughout this memorable performance, woodwind playing was consistently beguiling – not least during that approach to an apotheosis such as benefitted from Bleuse’s refusal to overstate its emotional rhetoric.

Nothing wrong with an all-Ravel first half, even if Rapsodie Espagnole may not have been the ideal continuation. Yet that sultry aura exuded by Prélude à la nuit felt almost tangible, as was the ominous unease of Malagueña and the rarefied elegance of Habanera, before the mounting excitement of Feria carried all before it. Bleuse successfully brought out the nostalgic resonances at the centre of this finale, and even if the closing bars lacked a degree of visceral excitement, the sense of a cohesive or cumulative whole could hardly be denied.

After the interval, a welcome hearing (less frequent these days than might be imagined) for Liszt’s First Piano Concerto. Executed with the right panache and an absence of histrionics, its formal succinctness and cyclical ingenuity are its own justification; not least as rendered with such attention to detail or expressive impetus by Ryan Wang (above). The winner of last year’s BBC Young Musician competition, he evidently has technique to spare while being equally capable of a delicacy and understatement ideally suited to the pensive ‘slow movement’ or the teasingly playful ‘scherzo’. The opening section was enhanced by a poetic contribution from clarinettist Oliver Janes, while the ‘finale’ headed to an exhilarating peroration. Wang duly acknowledged the applause with his leonine rendering of Chopin’s ‘Heroic’ Polonaise.

The programme ended with the suite from Bartók’s pantomime The Miraculous Mandarin. This is music which all too easily descends into overkill, but Bleuse kept a firm grip on its progress from the frenetic opening evocation of urban traffic, via its mounting anticipation with the arrival of the three ‘clients’, through to a bewitchingly shaped encounter between the mandarin and the woman. Nor was there any absence of virtuosity in a climactic chase-sequence, even while the emphasis on its rallentando markings proved a little too intrusive.

Most surprising, however, was a relatively prolonged silence after its explosive ending. Was the audience nonplussed by its once-infamous scenario, or was it unaware of this supposedly familiar music? Whatever, the performance assuredly seal the seal on an impressive concert.

For more information on the 2025-26 season head to the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra website. Click on the names to read more about soloist Ryan Wang and conductor Pierre Bleuse

Published post no.2,740 – Sunday 7 December 2025

New music – Isobel Waller-Bridge – Objects (Mercury KX)

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by Ben Hogwood, from the press release

Objects is the new solo album from Isobel Waller-Bridge, out today on Mercury KX. An act of radical stillness, written over four years in the rare quiet moments her career allowed, the album draws from the philosophies of Pauline Oliveros and the experimental radicalism of Stockhausen. Mining sounds from her surroundings and filtering them through minimalism and musique concrète, Waller-Bridge finds music within everyday materials — a ball, a shoe, a cushion, a pane of glass — each becoming a conduit for tenderness and attention. Calling upon trusted collaborator Jonny Woodley, in addition to renowned mastering engineer Heba Kadry (Björk, Ryuichi Sakamoto, John Cale) and mixing engineer James Ginzberg (Lyra Pramuk, Laurel Halo, Anja Lauvdal), Waller-Bridge assembled a team of fellow Deep Listening enthusiasts to bring ‘Objects’ to life.

Stillness is a form of presence that transcends motion – and stillness was something Waller-Bridge did not have. Leading the vanguard of a new wave of composers writing beyond the margins, her scores have become highly sought after because they extend beyond atmosphere and into the realm of psychological portraiture. The unspoken tensions and desires beneath the skin of her subjects colour her worlds: the neurotic gravity behind Munich: The Edge of War, the electronic curdle of Sweetpea, the swooning pastiche of Emma, the hellbent screech of self-destruction on Fleabag, and the BAFTA-winning and Oscar-nominated The Boy, the Mole, the Fox, and the Horse.

Now, with ‘Objects’, Waller-Bridge has turned that gaze inward. Where her 2022 album ‘VIII’ articulated a tormented mind’s undoing, ‘Objects’ is an act of radical stillness. It confers beauty on things the pace of our lives has taught us to ignore, inviting us to listen not as an objective experience, but as a personal and mysterious response to the world.

“These pieces are simple, strange, and lovingly handmade – oddities that feel to me like small miracles,” Waller-Bridge shares. “They reflect how I move through the world: with curiosity, with slowness, and with an openness to the unexpected music in everything. This album isn’t about performance, it’s about presence.”

An acclaimed collaborator in her own right, Waller-Bridge’s recent commissions include 2024’s original work for the American Ballet Theatre for their new production of ‘Crime and Punishment’ alongside ‘Temperatures’ for the Philharmonia Orchestra, which premiered at the Royal Festival Hall in November 2021. She has also collaborated with fashion houses Alexander McQueen and Simone Rocha, scored installations at Frieze London and Venice Biennale, and partnered with Francesca Hayward, principal ballerina at the Royal Opera House, for her dance film ‘Siren.’

Waller-Bridge reflects, “Whether it’s a film, a ballet, or a record, each project feels like a new language of self-expression, this album taught me that exploration is endless — and for me, there’s a deep peace in that thought.”

Objects is out via Mercury KX. CD and vinyl releases are set to release January 23, 2026. You can listen below:

Published post no.2,739 – Friday 5 December 2025

New music – Grand Central Vs The Works – The Hip Hop Sessions, Vol. 1 (Grand Central)

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by Ben Hogwood

Grand Central Vs The Works will bring back fond 1990s memories for many, but also serves as a futureproof set of releases. It is a collaboration between The Works and what Grand Central head Mark Rae calls “a vault full of Grand Central DATs. Featuring The Jungle Brothers, The Pharcyde, Tony D and Rae & Christian. We are excited to share what has been an amazing journey in fusing the past with the future. Make sure to add to your playlists!

You can listen below:

Published post no.2,739 – Friday 5 December 2025

Switched On – Daniel Avery – Tremor (Domino)

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by Ben Hogwood

What’s the story?

To quote the press release, Daniel Avery returns with his most ambitious work to date.

“Channelling every corner of his sound, Tremor is a bold and transportive body of work through euphoric shoegaze, submerged techno, ambient soundscape and industrial bliss. It remains unmistakably Avery, yet dramatically evolved.

As with his previous long player, Avery brings an inspiring cast of collaborators, headed by Alison Mosshart (The Kills) but also featuring Walter Schreifels (Quicksand / Rival Schools), bdrmm, Julie Dawson (NewDad), yeule, Ellie, Art School Girlfriend, yunè pinku, and Cecile Believe.

“This is a living and breathing collective,” says Avery. “Since the earliest recordings, Tremor felt like a studio in the sky, a space in time through which we could all pass as artists” he reflects. “It’s the welcoming spirit of acid house with the doors flung open wider still to allow in every influence from my musical journey: the warmth of distortion, the stillness inside intensity, the transcendental beauty of noise… They have always been there in my music but now it feels like those ideas are being transmitted in Technicolor. This is a record for the post-rave comedown kids, the guitar heads and anyone else who wants to come along for the ride. Everyone is welcome.”

What’s the music like?

Expansive – and also progressive. Avery is honing his approach, happy to mix a song-based structure with spacious instrumentals, all with an eye on the headphone listener.

Shoegaze influences abound, while there are also echoes of Trentemøller and Nine Inch Nails, but the overall has Avery’s unmistakable stamp of quality, the otherworldly elements that give his music such a striking profile.

There is a huge space for Cecile Believe’s cool vocal on Rapture In Blue, then big guitars, NIN style, for Haze. A Silent Shadow is similarly massive, with a lovely haze to the  bdrmm vocals and an impressive punch to the grungy guitars. Greasy off the Racing Line has power but feels more derivative, while Tremor itself is superb, reminiscent of Hybrid in their cinematic heyday. A Memory Wrapped In Paper And Smoke is a spacious treat after that, followed by the lovely, calming chant of Art School Girlfriend on closing track I Feel You.

Does it all work?

Largely – occasionally, the feeling of mid-90s nostalgia is impossible to ignore, but this feels largely a forward facing album.

Is it recommended?

It is. Daniel Avery creates unusual colours and soundscapes of the deepest hues, and their cinematic production proves the ideal foil for his vocal guests. Power, poise and ambience coexist to great effect here!

Listen / Buy

Published post no.2,735 – Thursday 4 December 2025