Aldeburgh

What does it mean to be located in a landscape or use place as a stimulus for composition? Writer, musician and broadcaster Kate Kennedy goes walking with present-day composers in the places that were important to their 20th-century predecessors. They explore how countryside, coasts and cityscapes become part of someone's life, and how years of living with them gradually find their way into music and the influences that continue to shape their own music today.

In this episode, Kate is in Aldeburgh - indelibly associated with Benjamin Britten. The work that most embodies his deep connection to this area of the Suffolk coast is his opera Peter Grimes. It combines Britten’s aural sense of this landscape, the bitterness of life lived there over the centuries and, famously, one of opera’s most intriguing outcasts.

Kate is joined by composer Colin Matthews, who worked with Britten in Aldeburgh in the 1970s. They retrace Britten’s regular lunchtime walk, from his famous Red House across marshlands to the beach to gain a sense of how Britten felt himself rooted (as the opera describes) in this windswept stretch of the east coast.

Presented by Dr Kate Kennedy
Produced by Adrian Washbourne
Mixed by Julian Mayers
Executive Producer: Rami Tzabar