Britten Pears Arts has announced that its 2025 Aldeburgh Festival will open on 13 June with the world premiere of Colin Matthews’ new opera A Visit to Friends. With a libretto by William Boyd, the opera takes the Chekhov short story of the same name as its inspiration.

Matthews (1946), was an assistant to composer Benjamin Britten in the 1970s and subsequently worked closely with composer Imogen Holst. He is the founder and executive producer at NMC Recordings and founded the Aldeburgh Composition Course in 1992. He is especially known for his large-scale orchestral compositions, including multiple BBC Proms commissions and collaborations with the late conductor Oliver Knussen.

A Visit to Friends is an opera about love and love’s frustrations, influenced in part by the music of Scriabin. Drawing on Anton Chekhov’s short story and William Boyd’s Chekhovian play LONGING, A Visit to Friends is an opera within an opera, where four characters rehearse for the first performance of a recently discovered opera with a libretto by Chekhov. 

Elsewhere in the Aldeburgh Festival programme, prolific operatic tenor Allan Clayton appears as featured artist, joining the Knussen Chamber Orchestra and conductor Ryan Wigglesworth to perform Britten song cycle Nocturne on 15 June. Clayton will also present an evening of song and chamber music with Sir Antonio Pappano on 28 June, to include Britten's Seven Sonnets of Michaelangelo and with the BBC Symphony Orchestra and Sakari Oramo on 22 June for Britten's Our Hunting Fathers. 

Singers Sophie Bevan, Lotte Betts Dean, Juliet Fraser and Claire Booth also take part with Booth performing the world premiere of featured composer Helen Grime's work Folk for soprano and orchestra on 15 June.

Andrew Comben, new Chief Executive of Britten Pears Arts following Roger Wright's retirement in 2024, said of the festival: ‘The 76th Aldeburgh Festival offers the opportunity to experience anew music’s transformative power to move, inspire, and connect. Joy, grief, love, loss and so much more, ‘dissolved in sound’ by composers and the artists who bring their work to life.'

The Aldeburgh Festival begins on 13 June 2025. brittenpearsarts.org/aldeburgh-festival