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Snape Maltings concert hall

The Aldeburgh Festival is an English arts festival devoted mainly to classical music. It takes place each June in the Aldeburgh area of Suffolk, centred on the main concert hall at Snape Maltings.

The Festival was founded in 1948 by the composer Benjamin Britten, the singer Peter Pears and the librettist Eric Crozier. The original intention was to provide a home for their opera company, the English Opera Group, but the vision was soon widened to include readings of poetry, literature, drama, lectures and exhibitions of art. The first festival was held from the 5 – 13 June 1948 and used the Aldeburgh Jubilee Hall, a few doors away from Britten's house in Crabbe Street, as its main venue. It featured a performance of Albert Herring by the English Opera Group; Britten's newly-written St Nicholas Cantata, op.42; and performances by Clifford Curzon and the Zorian String Quartet.

Over the years the festival grew and took in additional venues such as Aldeburgh's fifteenth-century church of Saint Peter and Saint Paul and venues in nearby Orford, Blythburgh and Framlingham. In the mid-1960s the Festival gained a new and much larger concert hall with the conversion of Snape Maltings, which includes one of the largest mid nineteenth-century barley malthouses in East Anglia. Most of the building's original character, such as the distinctive square malthouse roof-vents, was retained. The new concert hall was opened by the Queen on 2 June 1967, at the start of the twentieth Aldeburgh Festival.

Two years later, on the first night of the 1969 Festival, the concert hall was destroyed by fire. Only the shell of the outer walls remained. For that year the Festival was moved to other local venues but by the following year the hall had been rebuilt and once again it was opened by the Queen, this time at the start of the 1970 Festival.

The festival is now operated by Aldeburgh Productions, which also runs the Britten-Pears Young Artist Programme(formerly the Britten-Pears School for Advanced Musical Studies) and the Aldeburgh Residencies, a programme offering bespoke training and development opportunities to UK and international artists.

The festival retains a unique character, mostly due to its location in rural Suffolk. It also continues to emphasis the presentation of new music, new interpretations and the rediscovery of forgotten music. It has seen the premières of several works by Britten (A Midsummer Night's Dream in 1960; Death in Venice in 1973) and also Harrison Birtwistle's Punch and Judy in 1968.

The Festival's current Artistic Director is the composer Thomas Adès, appointed in 1999 aged 28.

• List of music festivals in the United Kingdom
• Sir Harold Atcherley