It takes either arrogance or great affection to prompt a composer to tinker with one of the supreme masterpieces of keyboard music, and in Robin Holloway's case it's entirely the latter. His Gilded Goldbergs, brilliantly presented by the pianists Alekszandar Madsar and Katherine Chi at Aldeburgh on Saturday morning, started life as a straight arrangement of Bach's Goldberg Variations for two pianos, an effort to make their contrapuntal intricacies (originally intended for a two-manual harpsichord) more manageable for amateur pianists like himself. But Holloway gradually grew bolder, and over a period of five years incorporated more radical recompositions into the set until his version took on a life of its own.
The 100-minute long result is utterly faithful to Bach's original sequence but surrounds the variations with a delightfully witty series of excursions, melodic and harmonic. It's immensely skilled, and immensely rewarding.
It's been a good festival at Aldeburgh: box-office records have been broken and the new regime of artistic director Thomas Adès and chief executive Jonathan Reekie has given a real buzz and freshness to the programming. The audience continues to be faithful and trusting, so that Saturday evening's concert by the Birmingham contemporary music group very decently filled the Maltings for a typical Adès programme in which only Stravinsky's Dumbarton Oaks Concerto could have been regarded as familiar.
Alongside a suite of pungent miniatures from John Woolrich, Ives's anarchic scherzo Over The Pavements, and another outing for Adès's own Concerto Conciso, in which he not only conducts a rhythmically fiendish score but plays the solo piano part as well, there were two world premieres. Stuart MacRae's Portrait was a festival commission, but turned out to be a real disappointment from the highly promising 23-year-old - a homage to Rothko, which seemed to miscalculate the effect of its routinely shifting colours - while Conlon Nancarrow's prickly Movements, receiving its first complete performance, was dismissed as unplayable after it was written in the early 90s, until Adès managed to fathom its rhythmic complexities and make them work.
Full houses for Ian Bostridge's recital and for the final concert, given by the Britten-Pears Orchestra under Vernon Handley, were more predictable. Bostridge and pianist Julius Drake offered a programme of Schubert and Britten that Peter Pears and Britten himself might well have given at the festival 30 years earlier. The Schubert - a sequence of 12 songs, each perfectly characterised and ending with the most hair-raising account of Erlkönig imaginable - came off best; the Pushkin settings of The Poet's Echo, which Bostridge sang in Pears's awkward English translation, are not first division Britten by any means, and his decision to sing only four of the withering settings of William Soutar from the cycle Whose Are These Children? was likely to upset the Aldeburgh purists. But even the old guard must have been impressed by his account of Our Hunting Fathers in the final concert. Bostridge savoured every word of the texts, compiled by Auden as a thinly veiled attack on the rise of fascism across Europe in the 1930s. Coupling the work with Tippett's A Child Of Our Time, beautifully paced by Handley, made perfect sense.
