In October 1976, the tenor Peter Pears was in Canada to perform music by Benjamin Britten, his partner of 37 years. Midway through a newspaper interview, the phone rang. The news from Suffolk was bad: Britten, just 62 but with a failing heart, was fading quickly. As it was, he would be dead before Christmas. ‘The festival is secure, thank God. The big push now is to get the study centre at Aldeburgh properly established,’ Pears told the reporter after hanging up. It was, he said, ‘Ben’s greatest wish’.
Known today as the Britten-Pears Young Artist Programme (BPYAP), the ‘study centre’ started life in 1972, when nine singers were invited to Snape Maltings to take part in a masterclass given by Pears alongside his teacher Lucie Manen. The following 50 years have seen musicians at the beginnings of their (very often illustrious) careers come to Aldeburgh to experiment, collaborate and take risks outside the hierarchical structures of music college. BPYAP has evolved away from the confines of the masterclass format in which it began, when Pears guided the students with patrician charm through music by Schubert, Purcell and, of course, Britten. Today, it comprises courses for instrumentalists, singers and composers,
