Tickets Selling Slowly For Benjamin Britten Centenary Concert

He is regarded very much as a son of Suffolk, having been born there, and having been responsible for the founding of the popular Aldeburgh Festival. It is disappointing therefore to hear from the Marina Theatre in Lowestoft that only about a fifth of the tickets have currently been sold for a concert by the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra (RPO) to celebrate the centenary of the birth of Benjamin Britten. With the concert taking place on November 29th, there is still time however for the position to improve.

Benjamin Britten - son of Suffolk

Martin Halliday, the venue's chief executive, said he was "struggling" to understand why. "It is one of our slowest-selling events in the last decade - they just don't seem to like Britten," he said.  "We have a lot of people who are fans of classical music, but we don't know if it's because they don't know [Britten's] music that well or whether they've been brought up to believe they won't like it or won't enjoy it."

In stark contrast to the news from the Marina, Aldeburgh Music, which stages the Aldeburgh Festival, said it had already sold half of the tickets for the Britten opera it is staging in Lowestoft with three months still to go before the performance.

Spokesperson Shoël Stadlen, said: "People have come to associate Britten with Aldeburgh, because that's where he spent the majority of his later life, but he was born in Lowestoft, wrote his first music there as a young boy and it's where he acquired his love of the sea.

"An important part of our Britten Centenary Weekend in November is to raise awareness of Britten's rootedness in Lowestoft as well as Aldeburgh and we intend to hold more projects there beyond this year."

Britten was born in Lowestoft in 1913, but spent some time before and during World War II in the USA before returning to Suffolk to live in Snape and Aldeburgh, where he founded the Aldeburgh Festival in 1948.

                                           http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Benjamin_Britten