Under the artistic and administrative management of Thomas Adès and Jonathan Reekie, the Aldeburgh festival is colonising East Suffolk, finding new locations to broaden the range and the appeal of the programme. The Pump House down on the marshes in Aldeburgh is now well-established, with a regular weekend programme throughout the festival, but the latest addition to the roster of venues is much more unlikely: the Bentwaters Airbase, at Rendlesham, five miles from the Snape Maltings Concert Hall. The US Air Force left the base in 1993; now it is a collection of airstrips and lonely buildings with a forbidding air.
Reekie and Adès found exactly the right work to present in the base's Debrief Centre. This was SPI: A ConSPIracy Cantata, for two contraltos, piano and electronics, by 33-year-old Yannis Kyriakides, a Cypriot-born composer now living in Holland.
SPI brings together two kinds of message: the gnomic pronouncements of the Delphic oracle and the gabble of shortwave broadcasts - mixtures of letters, digits and Morse code - that are apparently sent to agents around the world by secret services such as MI6 and the CIA. That material, together with processed and live piano sounds, provides the textural and harmonic backdrop to the singers (Ayelet Harpaz and Stephie Büttrich here, with Marion von Tilzer playing the piano and the composer manipulating the amplification and electronics).
Although the idea is a highly original one, and Kyriakides manipulates his material with great skill, the rhythmic interest is limited and variety of tone colour too predictable. The opening is promising, with the entry of the singers theatrically delayed, but as the piece develops there are not enough new possibilities to be explored in a 50-minute work.
Earlier the same day in Aldeburgh Parish Church the Brodsky Quartet and pianist Tom Poster introduced another work that overstays its welcome. Alexander Goehr's Piano Quintet was commissioned by the Carnegie Hall in New York for Peter Serkin and the Orion Quartet and composed in 2000, but this was its world premiere. It is a three-movement piece lasting the best part of half an hour, and is couched in a sinewy musical language: the textures are transparent, and the working-out generally follows classical schemes. There are some flashes of striking textures, moments when the medium is given a revealing twist, but there is too much dogged harmony and a lack of enduring ideas.
