The Edinburgh International Festival: Where do we go from here?
On Sunday night I attended the closing concert of the Festival. To be truthful I found it slightly underwhelming, in comparison to the opening concert, ‘The Buddha Passion’, which managed to be melodic and accessible but also to tell a story to answer the question posed by the Festival: “Where do we go from here?” This is a question posed by our new festival director Nicola Benedetti. It was lovely to see how warmly Nicky was greeted in a packed Usher Hall when she thanked us for coming and reminded us one last time to turn our phones off! She truly is a national treasure and we should all be grateful that she has stepped up to the plate and undertaken this very difficult job. Let us remember she is the first Scot, the first woman and the first musician to undertake this job and that itself is to be applauded.
However Nicky posed the big question, “Where do we go from here”? People should understand this came from the writings of Martin Luther King and of course in that sense it is one of the biggest questions of our time, posed in his great ‘I have a dream’ speech, celebrating its 60th anniversary this week. For the Edinburgh International Festival it is perhaps a more modest objective, but after 75 years of the Festival it is time to reflect on its relevance to Edinburgh and our community (not forgetting two thirds of the Festival audience come from Edinburgh) and to Scotland, remembering here that part of the Festival’s mission is to show the best of Scottish culture to the world, something frequently neglected by previous directors. Finally this is of course the Edinburgh International Festival and it remains the leading international arts festival in the world. Visiting friends from Adelaide, host of another great international arts festival each March, confirmed that Edinburgh dwarfs Adelaide in its scale, taking account of both the International Festival and the Fringe. The latter with its 3000 different events which helps draw in 250,000 visitors to Edinburgh and create the buzz that is the Festival. So it’s a good question to ask, “Where do we go from here?” and apart from the obvious answer “on to next year’s Festival” clearly Nicky has begun to give her answers in her scheduling for this year. So how has she done?
Firstly let me pay tribute to Nicola Benedetti. Some people thought she might be mostly a figurehead who would leave the real work of programming to her staff. Indeed I asked her this early on but she reassured me she was in the office every day taking the decisions and it is very much going to be her Festival. So it has proven to be, and she must be ready to respond to criticisms which are offered in a friendly way from the Edinburgh Music Review. Our writers have reviewed over 60 Festival shows, managing throughout to get the reviews up within 2 days of the event. The individual reviews of each concert are available on the pages of the Edinburgh Music Review. Some are glowing in their conclusions, others more critical, and with one so little to my taste I walked out, a point of some controversy! However, on the whole our reviewers have given a positive review to Nicky’s first Festival. We have felt and seen her enthusiasm; she has been an open and warm presence at many festival events and has always been approachable to the audience and even critics! I like her idea of harnessing Tom Service of Radio 3 to give us introductory talks online to certain concerts and also the additional information texted to us before and after concerts. On the downside there has been some confusion over concert programmes and at £5 a time fewer people are buying them.
I like the idea of using the Hub as a welcoming “Green Room” for the festival and it certainly was a comfortable space but I suspect that this may have been at the expense of fewer seat sales at the Hub for concerts. We also noted with some distress that the former excellent cafe on the ground floor of the Hub has become a canteen for Festival staff only, I suspect not very good for Festival finances.
This does raise a major issue for the festival: the question of money, of Festival funding and Festival ticket prices. Firstly I should say that at the Edinburgh Music Review we are fully aware of the Festival’s problems in funding and very supportive of increased funding from Creative Scotland, the Scottish Government and Edinburgh Council, not to mention the private sector, including Baillie Gifford. We are so fortunate to have the greatest art festival in the world in one of the most beautiful cities in the world and even at times of adversity it should be properly funded. If we don’t fund it the Festival will suffer and decline; already it is of very limited importance to opera goers with no fully staged operas this year. Looking at what Salzburg, Wexford, Buxton and other summer country house festivals like Garsington achieve on limited budgets, it is very difficult to see why we cannot re-install fully staged operas at the heart of the Festival. In particular Scottish Opera should be at the centre of the Festival, as it once was. We still remember their prizewinning Ring Cycle. Scottish Opera produced a superb world class ‘Il Trittico’ this season which would have fitted very well at the centre of the Festival. I spoke to Nicola Benedetti about this at the Festival launch last year and she promised to take this issue seriously, so one answer to “Where do we go from here?” is to return staged opera to its historic place at the heart of the Festival.
The question of money also raises the question of ticket prices for the Festival. Traditionally Edinburgh has been an accessible low cost festival, certainly in comparison to some European festivals such as Salzburg where it can cost you one hundred euros to get into a concert. Now because of funding cuts the Festival has been steadily raising ticket prices over recent years. Indeed I warned our previous director Fergus Linehan about this a couple of years ago and noted that last year attendances were down by 7%. I have asked the Festival for attendance figures for this year but our critics report that many concerts particularly in the Queen’s Hall were half empty. Indeed I attended the opening concert at the Queen’s Hall which sold 400 tickets out of 900, and the closing concert there only sold 488 tickets. The added dimension this year was highlighted by a good article by Kate Calder in the Edinburgh Music Review which got a big splash in the Scotsman. This was the Festival introducing so-called ‘flexible pricing’, that is raising the price of tickets when they were seen to be in high demand. This was brought home when I planned belatedly to go see Catriona Morison, the award winning Scottish mezzo-soprano, at the Queens Hall. I checked there were tickets available, but the cheapest ticket was £59 in a seat which would have cost me £7 some years ago. I didn’t go of course and I have met many people at the Festival who tell me they have cut back the number of concerts they have attended. Now two thirds of concert goers come from the Edinburgh area, many are pensioners and while not poor enough to qualify for concessionary tickets, they aren’t rich and higher prices mean less concerts. The festival is in danger of pricing the ordinary concert goer out of the Festival. So where do we go from here? Throw out flexible pricing and bring back concessions for all pensioners and young people, better to have halls filled at lower prices than half empty halls.
Another issue raised by Nicky’s first programme is diversity in terms of music and performers. This has led to a number of jazz or jazz influenced performances in a Festival which has been traditionally seen as predominantly classical music and opera. There have indeed been the occasional jazz musician in the past but there does seem to be a much bigger number this year. I’m a jazz fan and regular attender at the Edinburgh’s Jazzbar, particularly the wonderful big band on a Monday evening. I do note that there is the Edinburgh Jazz Festival in July just before the International Festival in August and wonder whether we need a major jazz element in the International Festival. More significantly I note that this year’s Festival almost totally neglects folk music, apart from one session at the Hub with Aly Bain and Phil Cunningham. The truth is that Scottish traditional music is one of Scotland’s major cultural contributions to the world which is of course one of the Festival’s mission statements. A couple of years ago Fergus Linehan had a major stream of traditional music in the Covid affected ‘big tent Festival’. It was a great success with big audiences but the following year it disappeared and sadly Nicky’s first festival has neglected it. Nicky knows the traditional music scene well and indeed she, along with prominent classical musicians like cellist Su~a Lee, have engaged in crossover attempts to connect classical music and folk music. So where do we go from here in terms of diversity of performance? I’m not opposed to jazz but I do think there should be a major stream of Scottish traditional music in the Festival and the Edinburgh Music Review would be very happy to recommend our highly respected folk adviser David Francis to advise the Festival. Scotland has a superb and growing group of traditional musicians, a very good specialist school in Plockton and a very fine traditional music course in the Conservatoire in Glasgow. These musicians are stars at festivals all over the world. Let’s showcase them in Edinburgh.
There are of course many other questions around the big question “Where do we go from here?” One discussion I participated in at the Hub tried to answer the question in a session headed “Community or Chaos”. We heard from Nigel Osborne, professor emeritus of music, at Edinburgh who developed a community music course at Edinburgh and was associated with War Child in Bosnia. Indeed I helped get him a grant from the European Parliament when I was an MEP in charge of music policy. I spoke at this discussion and advised Nicky we didn’t need to reinvent the wheel when it came to getting music into the community. We have experience of this, indeed in the audience was Clea Friend one of Nigel Osborne’s community students who is running a very successful community music hub in Stockbridge. Also in Scotland we do have the Big Noise in Raploch in Stirling and in two other areas, where we are taking music education into working class communities. We know what to do. What we need are well funded community initiatives and yes that could include the Festival taking music out to the community, as Scottish Opera do with their small scale touring projects.
Edinburgh Music Review has welcomed Nicola Benedetti’s first Festival and have enjoyed bringing it to the thousands of people who read our online reviews. We have attempted to respond to Nicky’s question “Where do we go from here?” and suggested some answers. Of course the most important answer is on to next year’s Festival where we hope, with some changes in emphasis regarding opera and ticket pricing, Nicola will lead the Festival in committed implementation of the positive themes established this year: i.e. to musical excellence from around the world, to celebration of Scotland’s cultural contribution, to community regeneration, inclusivity and accessibility.
One final suggestion: Nicky is one of the finest violinists in the world and, although I know she played the odd bit in the Festival, I hope she will develop this. Is it too much to hope that in due course as she develops in stature both as a musician and as a cultural leader she will give us a major Nicola Benedetti concert as part of the Festival. Now that’s one suggestion I suspect that would get popular support!
Cover photo: Andrew Perry
