Nothing beats Benjamin Britten on a moonlit beach

The people of these islands are moving out of doors. Windows are being thrown wide, BBQs dusted down, garden sheds spilling shabby deckchairs into surprised gardens. Even our grey winter skin is yielding to the warmth of the continuing sun. We are beginning to trust that summer has arrived.

Nowhere will the hopes of al fresco pleasures be higher this weekend than in the Suffolk resort of Aldeburgh, whose music festival is celebrating the 100th anniversary of the birth of its founder, Benjamin Britten. The little town will have seen and heard nothing like it. For at the heart of its two weeks of concerts is embedded a series of extraordinary performances.

In the early 1940s, Britten was in America and homesick for England. He picked up an article by E M Forster in the now-defunct magazine The Listener about the Suffolk poet George Crabbe, and read Crabbe’s narrative poem The Borough, set in his home town of Aldeburgh.

Suddenly, Britten ached with nostalgia. “In a flash I realised two things: that I must write an opera and where I belonged.” He and his partner, Peter Pears, returned to Aldeburgh, where they would live out their lives. And the opera, based on Crabbe’s story, was Peter Grimes.

Today, Britten’s status has never been higher. In Radio 3’s current celebration of British composers, his name is ranked with Tallis, Purcell and Delius. Debate hovers around the question of whether Peter Grimes is the greatest of all British operas – or, when passions are roused, whether it isn’t simply one of the greatest operas of all time.

This weekend, audiences in Aldeburgh will have the chance to judge for themselves. There will be two concert performances of Grimes, plus – and this is the special treat – three on the Aldeburgh beach itself.

Picture, if you will, a long, wide stretch of shingle where fishing boats and tackle still litter the shoreline, and where shacks still sell freshly caught fish several days of the week.

The sky is high and wide – this is a place of skyscapes rather than landscapes. Along the seafront, a haphazard line of houses – all colours, shapes and sizes – spills holiday visitors daily on to the little promenade, or to enjoy fish and chips on the beach (one of my favourite treats).

There is always an air of relaxed pleasure around. People meet and walk and cycle, enjoying the places that Britten loved so much: the estuary, the river, the long vistas to ancient churches across the marches. Now, they will be enjoying his opera in the place that inspired it and where much of its story is set.

Peter Grimes is a strange, disturbing tale: the story of a lone and lonely fisherman who hires apprentices to help him, but abuses them until suddenly they are around no more. Britten makes this disturbed man a symbol of the outsider, rejected by the bigoted and hostile crowd – a jostling, rowdy mob, conjured from the lines of Crabbe’s great poem.

Here, on the very shore, where the tide sucks at the shingle (a sound conjured so vividly in the music) under a sky where winds can blow up suddenly and drive people into pubs and homes (a mood captured exactly in the score) audiences will sit under the darkening evening sky and hear Britten’s music at the very place that brings the story to immediate life. Unlike a concert hall or opera house, singers and orchestra will send out their sounds into the air and into the night.

Where will it end, I wonder? Reaching to the stars, echoing onwards for ever, as Grimes sings in his great aria with its heart-wrenching lyric: “Now the Great Bear and Pleiades / where earth moves / Are drawing up the clouds of human grief…” And a sigh will go up from the beach at that.