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Tom Service visits the Aldeburgh Festival as it prepares to mark the centenary of the birth of Suffolk composer Benjamin Britten with a staging on the beach of his opera Peter Grimes.

Tom meets the director Tim Albery, singers Alan Oke and Giselle Allen who are playing Grimes and Ellen Orford, two local schoolboys Fleetwood Daniels and Nathan Hayward who are playing the Apprentice and Simon Reid who has lived in Aldeburgh all his life and works on the local lifeboat, who is playing the role of Dr. Crabbe.ÌýÌý

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Ronald Blythe, author of the book Akenfield, had originally gone to the Suffolk coast in the 1950’s as an aspiring young writer but found himself drawn into Benjamin Britten’s circle and began working for the Aldeburgh Festival. He has now written about this experience in his new book The Time By The Sea. Tom met Ronald Blythe in the garden of his house in Wormingford (which originally belonged to the artist John Nash) to talk about his memories of Benjamin Britten.Ìý

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In Reinventing Bach, Paul Elie tells the story of how musicians including Albert Schwietzer, Pablo Casals, Glenn Gould and ÌýYo-Yo Ma have made Bach’s music new in our time, restoring Bach as a universally revered composer and revolutionizing the ways that music figures in our lives.Ìý Tom talks to the author and reviews the book with the conductor and Bach specialist Andrew Parrott.Ìý

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As Radio 3 celebrates British music, Tom looks at the vitality of Welsh composition both past and present in the company of two of today’s most prominent Welsh composers Guto Pryderi Puw and Paul Mealor.

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