Britten’s Endgame

Part of Britten 50 Years On, celebrating Benjamin Britten in collaboration with The Baroque Collective

Post-film Q&A with John Bridcut and Diana Hiddleston, hosted by David Pickard

To mark the centenary of Benjamin Britten’s birth, Britten’s Endgame explores the composer’s creativity in the face of death. Those closest to him watched anxiously as he raced to complete his final opera, Death in Venice, in defiance of medical advice, tackling an edgy subject with many resonances in his own life. His eventual heart operation left him incapacitated and prematurely old and frail, yet somehow, he rediscovered his creative urge to produce two late masterpieces.

This is a rich and poignant film about Britten’s final years, and the impact of what Peter Pears called ‘an evil opera’. The film features specially filmed performances of Britten’s music by Sarah Connolly (mezzo-soprano), John Graham-Hall and Allan Clayton (tenors), Xavier Phillips (cello), the BBC Concert Orchestra conducted by Paul Kildea, Schola Cantorum of Oxford conducted by James Burton, and the Fitzwilliam String Quartet.

Britten’s Endgame follows Bridcut’s first film about the composer, Britten’s Children, which was widely praised when it was shown on BBC Two in 2004, and will be shown in the Autumn schedule of our festival.

We are delighted that Diana Hiddleston, whose father Bill Servaes was general manager of the Aldeburgh Festival in the 1970s, who was a friend of both Britten and his life-long partner, Peter Pears, and who appears in the film, will join us for the Q&A with John Bridcut and Diana Hiddleston, hosted by David Pickard.