14 June - Yesterday, we set off on the coach to the Snape Maltings concert hall for another concert. The Snape Maltings is about 15 minutes from Aldeburgh. The Maltings used to be a malt house which was built by Newson Garrett in the mid nineteenth century, and was one of the largest in East Anglia until malting ceased in 1965. Benjamin Britten wanted to expand the Aldeburgh Festival, so he converted the largest malthouse at Snape into Snape Maltings Concert Hall with 820 seats. The concert hall was opened by the Queen in 1967. It quickly became famous because of its now legendary acoustics. Malthouses (or malt kilns) have an immediately recognisable shape: broad roofs culminating in a number of square vents (called bluffs) sticking up out of the ridge. The distinctive vents emitted a white steam and a sweet smell during the four days the barley was roasting at the kiln. In 1969 there was a fire at the Snape Maltings concert hall, so it was restored and reopened by the Queen in 1970.
We have caught the coach provided by Aldeburgh Music, to and from the Snape Maltings for several of the concerts. On the way, we pass a piggery (is that what they are called?), where lots of happy looking pigs and their little piglets roam around in the muddy paddocks. There are lots of little huts dotted around the paddocks, for shelter for the pigs. I wondered whether the pigs have any orderly system in place for working out which pigs and their piglets use which particular huts! Do they fight and squabble each night to grab the hut they want to shelter in, or does each adult pig stake their claim on a particular hut, and they all retire to the same one each time?!
The concert yesterday was all JS Bach, performed by the Monteverdi Choir and English Baroque Soloists, conducted by John Eliot Gardiner. The program started with the Motet Singet Dem Herrn, a couple of violin concertos, (single concerto in A minor and double concerto in D minor), cantata BWV 82 Ich Habe Genug, sung by Peter Harvey (baritone), then finished with cantata BWV 4, Christ lag in Todesbanden. This concert was broadcast live for BBC Radio 3 and can be listened to online for 7 days after the broadcast (so for those of you who are interested in hearing it, you should be able to find it on the BBC 3 website.
Before going to the concert, we had another wander around Aldeburgh, up to the higher parts of the village, with views to the beach. We also visited the cemetery at Aldeburgh Parish Church and saw the graves for Benjamin Britten, Peter Pears and Imogen Holst.
15 June – today was our second day to hire a car from the little car hire place in Snape, to drive around the Suffolk countryside. We set off in the bus to Snape to collect the car and set off to Wickham Market where we stopped and looked at the church which has recently been fully restored, then through a number of small villages then onto Chelsworth. We stopped there for a while, as it was such a pretty little village which is quoted as being quintessential village with thatched cottages down the main street, and a very cosy looking village pub and beautiful gardens. We then drove onto Lavenham for lunch. Lavenham was a very famous wool town and in the reign of Henry VIII it was ranked as the fourteenth wealthiest town in England. For at least 500 years, there was manufacture of wool and other kinds of cloth, which was the main source of wealth. The appearance of the town apparently has changed very little over the years and what we saw were half timbered houses leaning crazily over narrow streets at various angles.
The weather started to look rather ominous so we set off to make our way back to Snape through Bury-St-Edmunds. The traffic was pretty awful so we gave up trying to find the cathedral, so we abandoned that and went onto Long Melford to see the very old church. It was an extremely long church which is almost the size of a cathedral, but it is not.
We set off in earnest for Snape and the rain started bucketing down, complete with thunder and lightning. Visibility was a worry on occasions and didn’t help us to navigate properly – we missed a couple of important turns, so we had to unexpectedly venture into Essex into Colchester, then out again via the Ipswich bypass back to Snape! We dropped the car off in Snape then waited for the bus to go back to Aldeburgh, and he came slightly early and even we waived him down, he didn’t stop, so we had another 45 minutes to wait for the next one! Grrrr. Fortunately by the time we got back to Snape the rain had stopped, so we were not waiting for the bus in pelting rain.
