Bittern Press Trustees
Bittern Press published its first book, a history of the Britten–Pears School at Snape, in 2012. It achieved the status of a Charitable Incorporated Organisation in 2023.
Bittern Press publishes books on classical music and associated subjects with particular relevance to the music of Benjamin Britten and the history of the Aldeburgh Festival (now Britten Pears Arts).
Christine Airey
Christine Airey studied singing as a part-time student at Birmingham School of Music (now Royal Birmingham Conservatoire) and shortly after joined the BBC in Birmingham as a production secretary in Radio 3 Music. She completed various BBC radio training courses and moved to work as a presenter and producer for BBC Radio WM. After marriage and children intervened she volunteered for the Eyecan charity (formerly Jersey Blind Society) writing, producing, presenting and editing their talking newsletter In Focus. She has also been a Trustee of the Oakley Charitable Trust since 1996.
Simon Airey
Simon Airey trained as an accountant with Coopers & Lybrand, Jersey, and after a brief period with Deloitte Haskins and Sells joined Citibank, Jersey, in 1980. During his employment with Citibank he established international funds in Jersey and Luxembourg. Since leaving Citibank in 1995, he has been a non-executive director of funds in the Cayman Islands, Guernsey, Jersey and Luxembourg, retiring in 2023. He established in 2006 with US colleagues an asset management business and retired from active management in 2023. He lives with his wife Christine in Jersey.
Kenneth Baird
Kenneth Baird has served on a dozen boards in the cultural sector. Over the last four years he acted as Chair of the Birmingham Contemporary Music Group. He remains Vice-Chair of Milap – the acclaimed national body for Indian arts and culture. A graduate of St Andrews University, he joined English National Opera after a post-graduate year at the Royal College of Music. In the 1980s he was the senior executive at the Aldeburgh Foundation, working closely on festival planning with Sir Peter Pears, Oliver Knussen, Murray Perahia and Mstislav Rostropovich. He is the founding Chief Executive of the Liverpool-based European Opera Centre, where since the late 1990s he has worked on performance projects with Kent Nagano, Vasilly Petrenko and Domingo Hindoyan among others.
Jill Burrows
Jill Burrows studied Drama at Birmingham University. She was commissioned to write two plays for the Mercury Theatre, Colchester, and has written on theatre for publications including the Guardian, Plays and Players and the Times Educational Supplement. She was a production secretary at Radio 3 Music in Birmingham and then worked at the Red House, Aldeburgh, as secretary to Sir Peter Pears. For some years she edited and designed programme books and other publications for the Aldeburgh Foundation on a freelance basis. Working with the original writers, she co-translated novels from Icelandic and Faroese for Mare's Nest. She continues to work as an editor, designer and indexer for publishers such as Faber & Faber, Reaktion Books and Elliott & Thompson. She has collaborated with Philip Reed on Britten projects, including the six-volume Letters from a Life.
Moira Bennett
Founder Trustee; retired summer 2025
Moira Bennett was born in South Africa in 1925 and has lived in Britain since 1971. After a relatively conventional family life she embarked on a career in the arts in her mid-fifties, joining the staff of the Britten–Pears School in 1979 and becoming Head of Development for the Aldeburgh Foundation in 1982. Kenneth Baird, the General Manager of the Aldeburgh Foundation at the time, credits her with ‘effectively inventing sponsorship of the arts . . . and securing the Aldeburgh Foundation’s future’. In 1988 she was invited to open a Sponsorship Department at the Barbican Centre and subsequently worked in Development for the London Symphony Orchestra and Live Music Now, and as a consultant to the Irish Chamber Orchestra. Her ‘personal history’ of the Britten–Pears School, Making Musicians (2012), was a Classical Music Book of the Year.
Philip Reed
Philip Reed is a freelance musician, writer and editor. Following studies at the Universities of Leeds and East Anglia, he was Musicologist at the Britten–Pears Library, Aldeburgh, for more than a decade, and from 1997 until 2012 was Head of Publications at ENO, whose programmes he continues to curate. He served as editorial consultant for the Overture Opera Guides, published in association with ENO. An authority on the life and works of Benjamin Britten, Reed’s many publications on the composer include a six-volume edition of the composer’s correspondence. For their editing of the first two volumes of the series, he and his co-editor Donald Mitchell received a Royal Philharmonic Society Award. Reed has contributed to many studies of Britten’s music, including volumes on Peter Grimes, Gloriana, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, War Requiem and Death in Venice; edited The Travel Diaries of Peter Pears and On Mahler and Britten, and co-authored, with Mervyn Cooke, the Cambridge Opera Handbook on Billy Budd. Most recently, he has contributed chapters to Benjamin Britten Studies: Essays on an Inexplicit Art (Boydell Press), Benjamin Britten in Context and Elizabeth Maconchy in Context (CUP).