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Telegraph
17 hours ago
- Entertainment
- Telegraph
A Visit to Friends, Aldeburgh Festival: an exceptionally subtle and affecting take on Chekhov
The composer Colin Matthews has been for so long a central part of the Aldeburgh Festival, assisting Benjamin Britten in his final years, then as chairman of the Britten Estate, and mentor of so many young composers at the Britten-Pears School, that it is perhaps surprising that he has never written an opera. Now, working with the novelist William Boyd as librettist, he has conceived an exceptionally subtle and affecting one-act drama, interweaving an imaginary chamber opera based on a Chekhov short story with a modern rehearsal of the piece, with eloquently entangled results. The original Chekhov narrative of 1898 is a meditation on the transience of happiness and innocence lost: Misha is revisiting the dilapidated country estate where the mature Vadia and the younger Nadia live, and their emotional states are rekindled as both are in love with him – or the idea of him – but he cannot commit to either. The 10 scenes alternate between this story and the modern rehearsal of a newly-rediscovered opera based on it, with the characters Natalie and Vanessa playing the two women and Marcus as the visitor. This could all be deeply confusing, but the clear direction by Rachael Hewer, and designs by Leanne Vandenbussche, sharply clarifies the interactions, mostly with a set that revolves between the scenes, alternating the opera's Chekhovian setting with the modern rehearsal room. A well-observed rehearsal pianist supports the singers and the director Gregor, who also plays a silent Chekhov at the start and finish (with impeccably behaved dog Shosty). There is a clear delineation between old and new in this staging, but Matthews has chosen not to reflect this in his score, which is through-composed in an idiom that echoes the early style of the Russian composer Scriabin rather than his own mature modernism. This blurs the temporal framing of the piece, and cleverly enables him to evoke a rhapsodic romanticism at the moments when the two women express their love for the same man. It becomes increasingly clear that both Misha back then, and Marcus right now, cannot cope with the women's attentions, and he retreats from the scene. The revelation of the present-day relationships renders the opera impossible to produce. Misha's ultimate dilemma, his weakness, is the focus of Chekhov's story, and really the story should just evaporate at this point, but here it is Vanessa who has the last word with a visionary aria about life's choices as the scenery hovers between old and new. The four singers – Lotte Betts-Dean and Susanna Hurrell as Varia/Vanessa and Nadia/Natalie, Marcus Farnsworth as Misha/Marcus and Edward Hawkins as the director Gregor – project Boyd's rather conversational text with clarity, and while Matthews's vocal writing may not provide sharp delineation between the characters, it is beautifully crafted to allow the words to project. As has happened before in Matthews's pre-operatic work with voices, it is in the dramatic instrumental interludes between the scenes that the passions are fully unleashed, and conductor Jessica Cottis evokes these powerfully with the superb players of the Aurora Orchestra. We are left with the regretful, Chekhovian sense that much remains unspoken and unsung in the taut drama we have witnessed.
The Guardian
04-05-2025
- Politics
- The Guardian
The English question now isn't about Reform or any party politics. It's we can't even talk to each other any more
It was unseasonably hot in Alford, Lincolnshire, and the early evening had brought a contented glow to the main street and residential avenues of this quiet market town. Colin Matthews, a genial former schoolteacher, was putting in another shift trying to convince people to give him another term as a local Conservative councillor and marvelling at the outbreaks of fury he was encountering. One man, he told me, had simply grabbed a bit of Tory campaign literature out of his letterbox and torn it into small pieces. A couple emerged from their house and got into a very large car. For some reason, they were both carrying huge slices of chocolate cake teetering on tiny white plates. What one of them told me was laced with a disdain. 'They don't normally turn out giving us leaflets,' she said, pointing at Matthews. 'They don't normally give two shits.' Even here, it seemed, rude and angry were the things to be. Matthews and a few of his fellow Tories explained some of the reasons for local people's fury: the government's plans to put up lines of pylons in the fields next to the Lincolnshire coast, and the giving-over of increasing expanses of land to solar farms. Outside the town's principal pub, a few people talked of immigrants in Skegness being housed while military veterans slept on the streets. It was an odd spectacle: flailing fury in an idyllic-looking environment, for reasons Matthews well understood. 'This country's buggered,' he said. It's certainly not a country that is prepared to give his party much support. In Thursday's council elections, Matthews was defeated by a Reform UK candidate who received nearly three times as much support. Lincolnshire's first mayoral election, meanwhile, was won by Andrea Jenkyns, the former Conservative minister who has just joined Nigel Farage's latest political vehicle. At 6.30 the next morning, I watched her give the most graceless, clunky acceptance speech I have ever seen, in which she said it was time for an end to 'soft-touch Britain' – kindness, be gone! – and suggested that asylum seekers should be forced to live in tents. The biggest part of this story was about Tory defeat and collapse. But Reform got close to twice Labour's vote in North East Lincolnshire, a local government area that includes Grimsby and Cleethorpes, a constituency with a Labour MP. Across the country, moreover, as the party took control of 10 councils and the Tories crashed, there was the same sense of a realignment of the right being part of something even bigger. A vocal chunk of Reform supporters – men in particular – is nothing if not familiar. They want 'British shops', zero immigration, the return of capital punishment and all the other things that usually make it on to the average hard-right shopping list. But in Lincolnshire I also spoke to newly converted Farage voters who spoke in much vaguer, tentative terms about how they simply craved change. What tied everybody together – along with plenty of abstainers – was the same bitterness and bad feeling I saw in Alford. Some 48 hours before polling day, Luke Tryl, the director of the More In Common thinktank, had reported back from his latest focus groups, which he said were brimming with a level of 'anger, despondency or misery about the state of Britain that doesn't feel sustainable'. That is completely right, and what has fundamentally caused that wave of negativity might be a lot simpler than some people would like to think. People's food-shop costs, council tax bills and dealings with HMRC highlight the fact that they are paying much more for far less – surely the dictionary definition of infuriating. The winter fuel allowance cut, one of those rare political stories that just about everybody now mentions, has cast the government – probably for keeps – as mean bureaucrats set on tilting the scales even further away from basic fairness. And these distributional furies are the context for a lot of people's complaints about immigration. There is also an overarching narrative about the last two decades. After the financial crash of 2007-8, the false dawn of Brexit, the pandemic, the war in Ukraine and the ongoing cost of living crisis, people have a sense of life amounting to one damn thing after another. In that context, Keir Starmer and Rachel Reeves following their election win with warnings that everything was about to get even worse was the most stupid thing they could have done. And here we are. Life continues to go round in circles, and with each grim rotation of the wheel, Farage and his friends get more and more popular. They do so despite the clear gap between the issues they habitually bang on about and what might actually improve millions of lives. Over the weekend, Reform leaders sounded off about teaching kids the wonders of the British empire, the evils of councils' diversity policies and how they were going to fight green investment. In the places where they will now be in charge, meanwhile, the same stark problems fester on, even amid affluence: hollowed-out local services, terrible public transport, a chronic lack of social housing and a shortage of work more fulfilling than driving delivery vans or making up the parcels that are piled into them. To point that out is not to overlook the politics of culture and identity, but still: if mainstream politicians finally began to act on those issues, maybe they would begin to be less loathed and mistrusted. That, in crude terms, is a picture of how this moment could pass. But I also wonder whether England might have irrevocably changed in ways that none of us yet understand. When I hear people pay tribute to Farage as a 'good lad' and see whole streets rush to take pictures of him on their phones, I rather wonder what has happened to our old bullshit detector. We are no longer the country of 'mustn't grumble' – quite the reverse, in fact. It often feels, moreover, as if the 21st-century combination of social media's polarising effects and all those economic convulsions has left us with an intensified version of an old national problem: our inability to really speak to each other and collectively bargain for a better country. All of us, it sometimes seems, are suffering from the political equivalent of road rage, manifested in either futile shouting or tense silence. The day after my stop in Alford, I spent two days in Boston, the Fenland town that has long been a byword for immigration from eastern Europe and support for Farage. As usual, I stayed at the local Premier Inn, and dined in the adjoining pub and restaurant. Outside, everything was aligning for a victory based on anger and disaffection. Inside, despite the 30 or so people who were seeing out their evening, there was a deathly quiet, and a scene that vividly summed up where we have arrived: among the pints of Madri and faux-traditional grub, even the married couples hardly said a word to each other. John Harris is a Guardian columnist
Yahoo
15-03-2025
- General
- Yahoo
Councils 'still committed' to restoring windmill
Councils in Lincolnshire have said they are committed to bringing a windmill back into use. It comes after £1.2m of funding was withdrawn from the Alford Windmill restoration project in December last year and reallocated to the Alford Manor House scheme. Lincolnshire County Council (LCC), East Lindsey District Council (ELDC) and the Alford Windmill Trust are now "exploring options" for how some of the Alford Manor House funding could go towards the windmill. Councillor Colin Matthews, who represents Alford on LCC, said the council had set aside more than £450,000 for the windmill repair project. The £1.2m of funding had originally been set aside from an £8m government grant for the Lincolnshire Wolds Culture and Heritage programme to create a new cafe, visitor centre and shop at Alford Windmill. The funding was then moved to fund the Alford Manor project, which included creating a new function room and other improvements, with the hopes that funding for the windmill could also be found. Matthews said: "We're exploring options that would see us gift the windmill to the local community, through the Alford Windmill Trust, and provide our funding to repair the cap and sails." Councillor Graham Marsh, portfolio holder for community safety, leisure and culture at ELDC said: "Conversations will continue here at the district council on how our officers can best support the conservation work at the windmill, preserving its heritage." John Smith, of the Alford Windmill Trust, said: "We're still at the start of the journey, but this is a positive step in the right direction that will help us rebuild confidence in this project. "With the support of not just the councils, but the community too, we can build momentum again and help create a lasting legacy for the town." Listen to highlights from Lincolnshire on BBC Sounds, watch the latest episode of Look North or tell us about a story you think we should be covering here. Volunteers 'devastated' as windmill funding pulled Windmill and manor house improvements approved Extra £1.2m to be spent on windmill restoration County gets nearly £63m for levelling up projects Lincolnshire County Council The Alford Windmill Trust East Lindsey District Council
BBC News
15-03-2025
- General
- BBC News
Lincolnshire councils 'still committed' to restoring Alford Windmill
Councils in Lincolnshire have said they are committed to bringing a windmill back into comes after £1.2m of funding was withdrawn from the Alford Windmill restoration project in December last year and reallocated to the Alford Manor House County Council (LCC), East Lindsey District Council (ELDC) and the Alford Windmill Trust are now "exploring options" for how some of the Alford Manor House funding could go towards the Colin Matthews, who represents Alford on LCC, said the council had set aside more than £450,000 for the windmill repair project. The £1.2m of funding had originally been set aside from an £8m government grant for the Lincolnshire Wolds Culture and Heritage programme to create a new cafe, visitor centre and shop at Alford funding was then moved to fund the Alford Manor project, which included creating a new function room and other improvements, with the hopes that funding for the windmill could also be said: "We're exploring options that would see us gift the windmill to the local community, through the Alford Windmill Trust, and provide our funding to repair the cap and sails." 'Build momentum again' Councillor Graham Marsh, portfolio holder for community safety, leisure and culture at ELDC said: "Conversations will continue here at the district council on how our officers can best support the conservation work at the windmill, preserving its heritage."John Smith, of the Alford Windmill Trust, said: "We're still at the start of the journey, but this is a positive step in the right direction that will help us rebuild confidence in this project."With the support of not just the councils, but the community too, we can build momentum again and help create a lasting legacy for the town." Listen to highlights from Lincolnshire on BBC Sounds, watch the latest episode of Look North or tell us about a story you think we should be covering here.
