Ryan Wigglesworth: Featured Artist at Aldeburgh
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- Ryan Wigglesworth, 46, has been chief conductor of the Glasgow-based BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra since 2022 — his first regular conducting post after a freelance career — while also a professor at the Royal Academy of Music since 2019 and a working composer and pianist.
- Wigglesworth was recruited to Sheffield Cathedral Choir as a child after a nursery teacher noticed him "belting out hymns"; the son of a butcher, he was the only boy from "the wrong side of the city" swept into a new world by music director Graham Matthews.
- Composer Oliver Knussen became "the central musical relationship" of Wigglesworth's life after a 12-year-old Wigglesworth heard Knussen's Third Symphony on the radio, wrote him a letter, and received a reply that proved formative to his own composing.
- Aldeburgh Festival makes Wigglesworth its featured artist this week, with the centerpiece a semi-staging of Debussy's Pelléas et Mélisande reuniting him with director Rory Kinnear and soprano Sophie Bevan — his wife, with whom he lives in rural Oxfordshire with three young children.
- The season also includes the premiere of a new Wigglesworth viola concerto written for Lawrence Power, his 2019 piano concerto performed by Steven Osborne, and a George Herbert song cycle curated for Bevan, whom Wigglesworth calls rare in her ability to "communicate directly with an audience without histrionics, without filter."
- Wigglesworth argues new classical music has been "pigeonholed" as a specialized pursuit separate from the rest of music-making, insisting that "for it to survive, new music must be at its heart" — and warning that retreating to conservatism would be the wrong response to the art form's current challenges.
- Wigglesworth doubts a child like him could find the same path today, saying the networks and resources that nurtured his own development are no longer in place and that the industry must tackle music education without waiting for government support: "Help isn't coming."
Why it matters: Wigglesworth uses his Aldeburgh platform and BBC SSO post to mount a defense of new music's centrality in classical programming at a moment when, by his own account, the informal pipelines — choir schools, library record collections, mentors willing to reply to fan letters — that produced him are no longer functioning for the next generation.
