Britten, the man who, in 1948 – with a little help from his friends – founded the Aldeburgh festival in a Suffolk fishing village, is almost absent from this year's programme. Apart from some film scores and a couple of less familiar song cycles, he is crowded out by Bartok and Bach, by the Renaissance anguish of Gesualdo and 1940s swing jiving on the beach, beginners welcome and never mind the shingle.
It's like having a coronation without the monarch or a cricket match without the ball. The composer died more than three decades ago, since when the festival has adapted and reshaped itself. Yet his powerful musical personality has always dominated. The non-appearance is easily explained: 2013 is Britten's centenary. Quite apart from celebrations worldwide, as well as rumours of a UK postage stamp and a coin from the Royal Mint, nothing will equal Aldeburgh's grand party for the composer, whose entire musical language is suffused with the shifting seascape, skies and marshlands of East Anglia.
The timing is excellent. It leaves, as they might say in Aldeburgh, the coast clear for proper festivities to mark another big birthday: Oliver Knussen's 60th. The British composer-conductor who, as a boy, was encouraged and mentored by Britten, has been an artistic director of the festival, lives nearby and is this year's artist in residence.
The opening event was a stupendous staging of his Sendak-inspired operatic double bill – Where the Wild Things Are and Higglety Pigglety Pop! – too rarely seen together since Glyndebourne's premiere pairing in 1984. It would be easy to devote all the available space to praising Netia Jones's ingenious direction and video designs, in association with Lightmap.
With immense skill, they have rendered Sendak's original drawings as live animation, so the appearance is at once enchanting and familiar – the boy Max in his white wolf suit, the toy boat rocking on a blue-green sea, the wild things with their clawed feet, scaly skin and toothy, ingratiating grins. Higglety Pigglety Pop!, the darker of the two stories, is equally effective, with its venomous, expanding-shrinking baby and the milk cart patiently passing by. All is like a monochrome engraving until the brightly coloured finale in which the nonsense words higglety, pigglety and pop, sung ever faster, take on riotous new life.
The terrific cast, led by the vocally acrobatic Claire Booth as Max and the gloriously cheeky and characterful Lucy Schaufer as Jennie in Higglety, exceeded expectation. Would surtitles have been useful (as I heard one older audience member ask on the way out)? Sometimes in Wild Things, the orchestra gets the upper hand and words are lost. But if you make sure you know the stories first, you will have no problem. Ryan Wigglesworth, a composer-conductor who has been guided by Knussen, drew incisive, glittering playing from the Britten Sinfonia.
The score, performed in these ideal conditions, was a revelation: rich, colourful, sonorous, full of wit and sly reference, vivid in its tears and its smiles. Mozart, Tchaikovsky and, above all, Mussorgsky dash in and out of the music, as if to keep our concentration alert with a shout or a wave. Fantasy opera – Ravel aside – can be an uphill struggle. Knussen's glimmer and glow in a class of their own. This co-production with the Los Angeles Philharmonic Association and the Barbican can be seen in London for two performances on 3 November. Go.
Knussen is revered by composers, adored by musicians. Somehow, by whatever charm or stealth, he has managed to woo stony-hearted critics too. On Saturday, after conducting the Scottish Chamber Orchestra at Snape Maltings, he was presented with the 2012 Critics' Circle Outstanding Musician Award.
The citation praises him for being "uncompromising, indefatigable, self-effacing and utterly generous… a beacon and mentor for an entire generation of composers and an exhilarating guide through the tangled complexities of modern music" – which says it all.
Another pleasure of Aldeburgh's first week, and part of a Hungarian thread across the fortnight, was a trio of concerts by the cellist Miklos Perenyi. This shy, unsmiling master, born in Budapest in 1948 – he is the same age as the festival – played Bach's six solo suites interspersed with mostly tiny, sharp shards of modernism by Kurtag, Ligeti and Zimmermann. These composers use glissandi, pizzicato and whispered harmonics of fiendish difficulty, immaculately and lyrically handled by Perenyi. The strange, low, twanging elastic band sound of Kurtig's The Shadows Again was mysterious and affecting.
One of the finest players in the world, yet hardly known here, Perenyi plays with minimal gesture and a delicate, warm tone. This is hardly fashionable – even in music there's a misapprehension that big is also beautiful – but always bewitching. His bowing arm is neat and undemonstrative, his facial expression inscrutable, often with eyes closed. A pupil of Casals, he honours that simple, profound tradition, though, unlike Casals, he doesn't play with a pipe in his mouth.
The preludes that open each suite take on a sensuous, improvisatory quality in Perenyi's hands. Whether in the melancholy Sarabande of Suite No 2 in D minor or the virtuosic challenges of No 6, Perenyi plays as if composing the music himself or conjuring it from the spheres – entirely fitting in the air-and-angels atmosphere of Blythburgh church. At the end, I swear I saw him smile.
As part of next year's bumper festival, Aldeburgh has commissioned new works from several composers. One is Harrison Birtwistle, a festival regular in recent years after a brief and somewhat chilly welcome in the Britten era. Even if the stories about Britten's antipathy towards the younger composer's Punch and Judy (1968) are wildly exaggerated, it's hard to find much in common between the two.
Birtwistle's Bow Down (1977), an improvised music-theatre work, is currently being toured by the Opera Group in association with the London Sinfonietta. They gave two performances in Village Underground as part of this year's Spitalfields festival. A versatile young cast of seven whisper, ululate, sing, play woodwind instruments or percussion, spin on a playground roundabout and mime a variety of close-up bodily functions from vomiting to ejaculation – using white glass marbles if you really need to know. It's all done with taut, rhythmic drill, fearlessly directed by Frederic Wake-Walker. Tony Harrison's murderous folk tale about two sisters remains as macabre as ever.
Next stop for Bow Down: Latitude. That other great Suffolk festival is held, with added-note harmony, near Southwold, just up the coast from Aldeburgh towards Lowestoft, where Britten was born and where as a boy he made sandcastles in the air, now realised in perpetual sound.
