A Visit to Friends/The Gildas Quartet evaluate – Colin Matthews’s luminous new opera opens Aldeburgh in fantastic taste

Few occasions really feel as haunted because the Aldeburgh pageant. Nearly 80 years because it used to be established via Benjamin Britten and Peter Pears – and a long time since their deaths – the couple nonetheless loom huge in its Suffolk environs, their mission endured via more youthful pals and collaborators.

None are extra eminent than the composer Colin Matthews, who assisted Britten within the ultimate years of his lifestyles. Now 79, Matthews has produced his personal first opera, on a Chekhov-inspired libretto via William Boyd: the arena premiere of A Visit to Friends opened this 12 months’s pageant, at the identical degree the place Britten’s Death in Venice made its debut 52 years in the past.

A Visit to Friends options an opera throughout the opera: scenes of a piece with a libretto via Chekhov and a ranking via an unknown composer that Matthews fashions on Scriabin are interrupted via the “real world” of rehearsals. Life imitates artwork imitating lifestyles; it’s “a very complicated visit to friends”, as one personality says. We hop between levels of the practice session procedure, whilst the inner opera’s plot pushes on.

In Leanne Vandenbussche’s ingeniously easy set, the wall of a contemporary practice session room revolves to show the disintegrating veranda of a once-grand Russian area. Harsh lighting fixtures flicks up as run-throughs are halted. The practice session pianist slides off and on (upright and all). Colours play continuously throughout a video backdrop, as though taking the temperature of the motion. Matthews’ ranking strikes between the charged, late-Romantic meandering of the inner opera and one thing slightly extra incisive for the rehearsals. But a lot of the tune is sluggish and delicately loose-limbed, its stagiest second (a freeze-frame-like trio and quartet) in “real life”, now not the fictitious opera. Gesturally, even though, the opera’s thespiness – hand-clasping, studied pointing, strolling with an extravagant turning-circle – is an international clear of the practice session’s naturalism.

That the self-conscious cleverness of the framing software didn’t pall says a lot about each the standard of efficiency and the lucidity of Rachael Hewer’s manufacturing. The small forged used to be uniformly superb: Marcus Farnsworth used to be easily ugly as Misha/Marcus, Susanna Hurrell a vibrant, brittle Nadia/Natalie and Edward Hawkins a pitch-perfect parody of a definite emblem of director. Lotte Betts-Dean’s Varia/Vanessa ruled, her mezzo so effusively rounded it used to be as though she stored discovering the resonant frequency of the auditorium. Conducted via Jessica Cottis, Aurora Orchestra revelled in Matthews’ suavely luminous ranking.

More Matthews adopted the following morning: the arena premiere via the Gildas Quartet of his Quartet No 6, between the Three Idylls via Britten’s trainer Frank Bridge and Beethoven’s String Quartet No 9 in C, Op 59 No 3. The 8 actions of Matthews’ quartet have been vividly characterized: there have been impish cascades of pizzicato, melodic traces that wandered, unhurried, and a slow-motion elegy that lingered just like the fragrance of a beloved one. Bridge’s Three Idylls showcased the Gildas’s fine-grained, mellow tone and overall musical symbiosis. Their Beethoven used to be exquisitely fashionable, from the cool, vibrato-free creation to its ultimate intoxicating rush. It used to be an totally compelling efficiency: exhilarating enjoying that recommended us to pay attention anew.