The 62nd Aldeburgh Festival of Music and the Arts

The 62nd Aldeburgh Festival of Music and the Arts takes place 12-28 June - celebrating the familiar and the unseen, with new works and new venues.

There's added excitement among Aldeburgh festival-goers this year. Snape Maltings (below), the venue where several of the main festival performances take place, has opened a cluster of newly converted spaces that will be formally showcased for the first time during the June event.

Photos © Drew Wiley

Set among an all-too-oft torrid landscape of reeds and marshes, the latest additions to the former malt house are part of a £16m overhaul - and they look and sound amazing. Open brickwork meets minimal fixtures and fittings, giving the space an industrial, non-fussy feel. Modern lights and the odd plasma screen add contemporary touches, without compromising the original features.

There's a really nice community feeling to the place, with some lovely eateries and a cosy pub. The latter was particularly useful when waiting to interview composer Harrison Birtwistle last week, who was rather delayed due to extended rehearsals for his latest work The Corridor, which premiered on 12 June in the 340-seat Britten Studio.

Aldeburgh (above) is one of my favourite places. A small(ish) coastal town in Suffolk, it oozes beauty, whether that be out of its endless grey seas, picturesque cottages or stony beaches. Oh, and it also has the best fish and chip shop in the country, in my humble opinion. Apart from a great chippy, Aldeburgh's famous for inspiring Benjamin Britten - to whom Maggi Hambling's wonderful scallop sculpture stands on the beach (below), with an inscription from Peter Grimes: 'I hear those voices that will not be drowned'.

Britten, along with singer Peter Pears and writer Eric Crozier, founded Aldeburgh festival in 1948, with a view to promoting emerging artists and supporting young musicians. Today, the festival is just one of the projects run by Aldeburgh Music, which has taken up residency at the new site at Snape.

On the second day of the festival, Saturday 13 June, I joined the throng queuing for Harrison's Clocks: A Promenade through a New Building - a combination of sound installations and live performances starting in the Hoffmann Building. The foyer was filled with clocks on loan from the British Horological Institute to mirror the theme of timekeeping, a visual snapshot that set the scene for the aural works based on timepieces and clock mechanisms.

Ligeti's 1962 composition Poème Symphonique for 100 metronomes was 'performed' in the Britten Studio, the acoustics doing justice to this remarkable piece that does exactly what it says on the tin - 100 metronomes are set off at the same time, gradually fading into the distance like a far-off rainstorm.

Birtwistle - who celebrates his 75th birthday this year and has myriad Aldeburgh events set up in his honour - had his only self-standing electronic work, Chronometer, played back in the Jerwood Kiln Studio. Using sounds from the mechanisms of Big Ben and the Wells Cathedral clock, it evokes meditation on the concept of time. The clock-inspired prom concluded with Birtwistle's tour de force for solo piano - Harrison's Clocks - invoking John Harrison's 18th-century timepieces.

Expected highlights for the rest of the festival include the continuing performances of Birtwistle's new work, The Corridor, the world premiere of Elliott Carter's Fratribute and Sistribute on 20 June, the world premiere of Helen Grime's A Cold Spring, commissioned by Aldeburgh and showcased later the same day, and the Britten-Pears Orchestra performing Bach arranged by Webern, among other delights, on 22 June.

For full festival listings, click here