Sophie Hunter

Played alongside Britten’s original six in a finger-twisting and embouchure-busting marathon, I will be performing all 12 pieces twice. The first time in a concert hall – Aldeburgh’s Jubilee Hall, where director Sophie Hunter will be with me on stage reading the stories from Ovid, Dryden and Ted Hughes that inspired the music. The audience are then being transported back in time to the original work’s premiere in vintage 1950s buses to the Meare and rowing themselves to the performance area. (There are arrangements for those unable or unwilling to row!)

FIRST NIGHT
Concert review: Nicholas Daniel/BCMG at various venues, Suffolk
Everything from the poems of Ovid to Japanese aesthetics inspired musicians at this year’s Aldeburgh Festival (4/5 stars)

Midsummer madness takes many forms. Britten’s Six Metamorphoses After Ovid was first performed in 1951 by the oboist Joy Boughton on Thorpeness Meare to an audience on rowing boats. Here we were, 66 years later, doing our best to steady our vessels on the same water while Nicholas Daniel, clad in flowing white linen (was he to be later sacrificed by Suffolk pagans?) was punted across the Meare to a floating platform to perform the same music. Unlike Boughton, whose music blew into the water, Daniel had an iPad.

We had earlier heard him play the same piece — alongside six new Metamorphoses Daniel has commissioned since 2013 — in Jubilee Hall in Aldeburgh. This, though, was an airless, stop-start experience (not enhanced by Sophie Hunter’s diffident readings from Ovid) in which the imaginative modern follow-ups to Britten caught the ear more than the original. Mark Simpson’s Windflower and Huang Ruo’s Actaeon were the pick of the bunch: the former a compressed drama in which Daniel’s oboe conjured up the livid gushing of Adonis’s blood, the latter a squealing, panting glimpse into the final moments of Actaeon the stag. Once we were out on the Meare, however, something unearthly happened and Britten’s tumbling phrases, snatches of song and hazy half-melodies darted across water, reed-beds and towards some unusually attentive cygnets on the bank. We sat in our boats, briefly bewitched by a modern-day Pan and his pipes.

Midsummer madness takes many forms. Britten’s Six Metamorphoses After Ovid was first performed in 1951 by the oboist Joy Boughton on Thorpeness Meare to an audience on rowing boats. Here we were, 66 years later, doing our best to steady our vessels on the same water while Nicholas Daniel, clad in flowing white linen (was he to be later sacrificed by Suffolk pagans?) was punted across the Meare to a floating platform to perform the same music.