Britten Pears Arts

Aldeburgh Festival of Music and the Arts

12 – 28 June 2026

Aldeburgh Festival has always been more than an appealing sequence of concerts. It is a place where music is made in full view of its past and its future; where composers, performers and audiences meet in the “holy triangle” Britten believed was essential to artistic life. In 2026, fifty years since Britten’s death, we reaffirm that principle as a living manifesto. 1976 marked an ending, but also a beginning: the moment the care, curiosity and exacting standards Britten and Pears brought to nurturing young artists became the enduring thread of the Festival and this organisation’s identity. 

This Festival opens with a gathering of artists who know one another’s work deeply – musicians who share a language of trust, risk and detail. Ryan Wigglesworth, our Featured Artist, leads a circle of artistic collaborators including Vilde Frang, Laura van der Heijden, Steven Osborne and Nicolas Altstaedt. They come not simply to perform, but to pass on what they have learned: forming chamber groups, standing side by side with young players, and allowing music to reveal its meaning through shared attention.

At the heart of this commitment is the new Festival Academy, directed by James Baillieu with Lise Davidsen, Nicky Spence, Caroline Dowdle and Julia Faulkner as faculty. Their work, and the Summer Academy that will follow it for instrumentalists, continues the legacy Britten and Pears established. It marks a new way for the Young Artist Programme to work, enabling young artists to flourish when surrounded by the very best musicians, challenged, nurtured and invited to experience the generosity of audiences at Snape.

Pelléas et Mélisande, semi-staged and directed by Rory Kinnear with designs by Vicki Mortimer and performed by Sophie Bevan, Sarah Connolly, Jacques Imbrailo, Gordon Bintner and John Tomlinson, opens the Festival with a work of exquisite delicacy and depth. Alongside Britten’s own late works, music by Feldman, Crumb and Kurtág sits beside new works by Ryan Wigglesworth, Tansy Davies, Freya Waley-Cohen, Tom Coult, Brett Dean and others, maintaining our commitment to the composers of today and the artists who bring their work to life.

Aldeburgh Festival 2026: made by the musicians and audiences who gather here, and the future they help reveal.

Ryan Wigglesworth

Making music at Snape Maltings over the past 25 years has been one of the great pleasures of my life. 

From the start, it felt like home – a place where the most important friendships were forged, a place to grow and develop artistically. So, the invitation to be “Featured Artist” for the 2026 Aldeburgh Festival was a very special and joyous privilege.

A strong sense of “family” has always been central to the spirit of the Aldeburgh Festival and accounts for why so many musicians feel drawn to put down artistic roots here. And what bliss it has been programming concerts involving so many of my dearest friends and colleagues: Nicolas Altstaedt, Sophie Bevan (literally family!), Sarah Connolly, Jacques Imbrailo, Rory Kinnear, Vicki Mortimer, Steven Osborne, Lawrence Power, John Tomlinson, as well as all the members of the two orchestras I’m lucky to be associated with – the BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra and the Knussen Chamber Orchestra (the latter itself a legacy of my “thanks-to-Snape” friendship with the late, deeply missed Oliver Knussen). It really is a great honour.

The role of “Featured Artist” also allows me the rare opportunity to wear all my hats under one roof, as it were: playing chamber music and song, premiering my new piece for Lawrence Power and the Knussen Chamber Orchestra, and conducting works that mean a great deal to me personally – none more so than Debussy’s Pelléas et Mélisande.

Ryan Wigglesworth 

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