Aldeburgh Festival Aldeburgh Festival The Aldeburgh Festival of Music and the Arts is an English arts festival devoted mainly to classical music. It takes place each June in the Aldeburgh area of Suffolk, centred on Snape Maltings Concert Hall. The Festival was founded in 1948 by the composer Benjamin Britten, the singer Peter Pears and the librettist/producer Eric Crozier. Their work with the English Opera Group (which they had founded with designer John Piper in 1947) frequently took them away from home, and it was while they were on tour in Switzerland with "Albert Herring" and "The Rape of Lucretia" in August
John Culshaw commissioned Britten's opera "Owen Wingrave," written expressly for television. He also persuaded Britten to conduct television productions of "Peter Grimes" and Mozart's "Idomeneo", and to accompany Pears in Schubert's "Winterreise". Britten and Pears invited him to Snape, not far from their base at Aldeburgh in Suffolk and he encouraged them to transform the Snape Maltings into a concert-hall. He later initiated the Benson and Hedges music festival at Snape and was planning the fourth season at the time of his death. Some of his BBC programmes have been preserved on DVD, including films of the Amadeus Quartet playing works by