Aldeburgh Festival: On Wenlock Edge

The Concert

Chamber music with two of the world’s greatest artists: Allan Clayton and Antonio Pappano join forces for Britten’s Michaelangelo Sonnets – plus, with LSO principals, we hear Vaughan Williams’ seminal song cycle and Elgar’s rhapsodic Piano Quintet.

Pappano and Clayton together perform what the latter refers to as ‘the most stunning love letter ever written’, Benjamin Britten’s Seven Sonnets of Michaelangelo. Setting love poems by Michaelangelo Buonarroti, this was the first work that Britten wrote specifically for his lifelong personal and professional partner Peter Pears.

These two consummate artists are joined by the principal string players of the London Symphony Orchestra for the original chamber version of Vaughan Williams’ On Wenlock Edge – a work of immense pastoral beauty that sets A E Housman’s A Shropshire Lad with a combination of folk-like Englishness and what the composer called ‘French polish’, thanks to his studies in Paris with Maurice Ravel.

The programme is completed by Pappano and the strings performing Elgar’s Piano Quintet, with its beginning evoking (as the composer wrote) ‘sinister trees’, its ghostly restless anxiety, and its wonderfully explosive end.