The 77th Aldeburgh Festival in June 2026 will see premieres from Tansy Davies, Tom Coult, and Lisa Illean, alongside music by John Woolrich and a rich selection from the Faber Music Benjamin Britten catalogue, marking half a century since the composer's death.
On 19 June Colin Currie will premiere Tansy Davies’ Percussion Concerto with the BBC National Orchestra of Wales, conducted by Kevin John Edusei. The concerto was co-commissioned by Britten Pears Arts and the Residentie Orkest; in 2025 Currie toured Davies’ solo percussion tour-de-force Dark Ground, as well as releasing a recording of the work. In 2023 he presented Davies with the Ivor Novello Award for Outstanding Works Collection.
Nicolas Altstaedt will give the UK premiere of Tom Coult’s Craftsmen and Clowns for solo cello on 16 June. The 14-minute work was commissioned by the Royal Philharmonic Society through the generous support of an anonymous donor. The title’s two archetypes represent competing principles in the piece. The cellist, Coult notes, is generally a craftsman or craftswoman – constructing, weaving, shaping. Their music, however, is occasionally interrupted by, or co-existent with, something more primal, or mischievous.
A new work for recorder, strings, and pre-recorded sounds by Lisa Illean makes its UK debut on 17 June from Genevieve Lacey and Britten Sinfonia, conducted by Gemma New. The 8-minute piece receives its world premiere with the Sydney Symphony and Lacey on 23 April; it will be presented in Australia and Suffolk alongside Illean’s Chansons - reworkings of two songs by Gilles Binchois for 12 strings: Amours merchi and Adieu, adieu, mon joileux souvenir. Premiering with Britten Sinfonia in 2024, the 5-minute work has since appeared in a choreography with Australian Chamber Orchestra and with Scottish Ensemble.
On 18 June Britten Sinfonia are joined by Helen Charlston for a Classically-inflected programme of music by Britten and John Woolrich. They perform Phaedra – Britten’s austere and wiry 15-minute cantata for voice, strings, harpsichord, and percussion with a text by Robert Lowell – alongside the sunny ebullience of Young Apollo for piano, strings, and a concertante string quartet. The 1939 work is inspired by the final lines of John Keats’ unfinished poem Hyperion: ‘‘-and lo! From all / his limbs Celestial…’ They are complemented by another evocation of myth – John Woolrich’s 8-minute Ulysses Awakes for viola and strings, with its taken from an aria from Monteverdi’s Il ritorno d’Ulisse in Patria, in which the titular hero finds himself washed up on the shore.
The Festival features numerous highlights from Britten’s chamber and song repertoire. The Poet’s Echo, Britten’s song cycle setting Pushkin for Galina Vishnevskaya and Mstislav Rostropovich, will be performed by festival artist-in-focus Ryan Wigglesworth and Sophie Bevan on 18 June. The third Suite for Cello, also written for Rostropovich, will be performed by Guy Johnston on 21 June; one of Britten’s most intensely personal works, it draws on Russian folk song arrangements by Tchaikovsky.
Sacred and Profane, a 1975 setting of eight medieval lyrics for unaccompanied SSATB choir, will be performed by the Festival Singers at Holy Trinity Church, Blythburgh, on 24 June. The Welcome Ode for children’s chorus and orchestra, Britten’s last completed work, opens Ryan Wigglesworth’s concert on 15 June with the BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra.