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Praise for Oliver Leith’s The Story of Billy Budd, Sailor at the Aix-en-Provence Festival

Aug. 25, 2025

Critics have praised Oliver Leith’s The Story of Billy Budd, Sailor at the 2025 Aix Festival – a collaboration with director Ted Huffman that condenses and reimagines Britten’s opera for chamber forces. The arrangement was commissioned by the Festival d’Aix-en-Provence.

Together Leith and Huffman have stripped back the story – originally by E.M. Forster and Eric Crozier, after Herman Melville’s novella – to its dramatic essentials, giving the work a running time of around two hours without interval. Leith’s adaptation of the score is for three keyboards and percussionist, onstage throughout, and a cast of six. The five performances were conducted by Finnegan Downie Dear.

Selected Reviews

The New York Times (Joshua Barone) July 18, 2025

The storm of emotion unleashed…brought the audience to its feet…An "orchestration" whose sampled effects…seem to summon…underwater worlds and siren songs while bells and bass drums, the only acoustic instruments, beat and sound war or a death knell.

Le Monde (Marie-Aude Roux) July 8, 2025

…with modesty and inventiveness, [Leith] found his own path…In the spirit of musical theatre that permeates this chamber opera, the orchestration more than works: it highlights the voices and the upheaval they call forth…

Télérama (Sophie Bourdais) July 7, 2025

…astonishing synthetic sounds…paint an original marine fresco, some of whose harmonies are musical kaleidoscopes illuminating the action… the music here is the great colourist of this show…the theatre was swept away by an ocean of emotions…

Ôlyrix (Olivier Delaunay) July 5, 2025

Pierre Audi…made a smart move to commission Leith…What we get is a startling inversion of the original opera…Leith is still and withdrawn, like a tide that’s suddenly gone out…Leith presents a wispy ghost ship, almost digital in its evanescence…There’s a hallucinatory quality to the bright chimes and cloudy throbbing synths that speaks beautifully to the confused morals and heightened desires of this delirious, unhappy crew.

The Spectator (Igor Toronyi-Lalic) July 19, 2025

The cast included Ian Rucker (Billy Budd), Joshua Bloom (John Claggart/Dansker), Christopher Sokolowski (Edward Fairfax Vere, Squeak) and singers from the 2025 Voice Residency in additional roles. George Barton and Siwan Rhys – who have previously collaborated with Leith on his opera Last Days, Doom and the Dooms and good day good day bad day bad day – played percussion and keyboard, with Richard Gowers as the second keyboard player. Read an interview about the project with Ted Huffman in VAN magazine here. 

Huffman and Leith condensed Britten’s opera by reinterpreting its narrative and sound world by concentrating on its essentials: the folk roots of the music and the sailor’s ballad, questioning the queer fog that floats down from Melville and Britten to contemporary audiences, and underlining the work’s political and metaphysical meditations on what constitutes humanity and community.


Interview with Ted Huffman, Director of The Story of Billy Budd, Sailor

The Story of Billy Budd, Sailor follows Leith’s celebrated operatic debut Last Days (2022). The 90-minute piece, with a text by Matt Copson, is based on Gus Van Sant’s 2005 film about a rockstar’s flight from rehab. It is also an opera, Leith noted in an interview with the New York Times, “about somebody putting their bins out.” Actor Agathe Rousselle played the non-singing role of Blake – a nearly-mute mumbling figure in a world where cereal bowls, glass bottles, and DHL delivery drivers have their own music. Following sold-out debuts at the Royal Opera’s Linbury Theatre and the Los Angeles Philharmonic, it returns to Covent Garden in December 2025.

To learn more about Oliver Leith, visit fabermusic.com.

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