Festivals: Edinburgh International Festival
Over the course of my long career, I have been privileged to take part in many festivals across the world, and it occurred to me that our readers might be interested to learn a bit about several of them.
Now, a festival can have many functions. It can establish a tradition which is continued over decades and represents the highest form of music-making in one particular location. It can be created to bring together disparate elements in one place in order to deliver a more cohesive artistic viewpoint. It can be set up to commemorate and honour a particular composer or founder. It can be created to bring different art forms into one umbrella. It can be founded to celebrate a particular country, or group of countries, or a city or group of cities. It can simply be an event, given a name, Festival, to attract tourists to an area out of season. Whatever the reason or function, a Festival is usually something a little different from the normal run of performances, and so stands out in many singers’ biographies as a highlight. Certainly, in my case, many of my career highlights have been associated with festivals!
Edinburgh, Scotland
The obvious place to start is my home Festival of Edinburgh. In 1947, soon after the end of the terrible conflagration of the Second World War, Rudolf Bing, an Austrian impresario, who had fled the Nazi regime, decided to set up a festival of reconciliation through music in the UK. After some consultation, Edinburgh was chosen as the venue for this festival, supported by the British Council, Edinburgh Corporation and private sponsors. Its history as the centre of the 18th century Enlightenment, as well as its dramatic geographical grandeur, with its hills, castle and seascape, and as well as its position 400 miles from the hub of British society, London, made it the perfect choice for this new festival of the Arts, with the aim of providing “a platform for the flowering of the human spirit”, bringing together people and artists from around the world. One of the most poignant events was the reuniting of the great conductor Bruno Walter, pupil and confidante of Gustav Mahler, with the Vienna Philharmonic Orchestra, signifying reconciliation. There were performances of Beethoven’s Pastoral Symphony and Schubert’s Unfinished, as well as Mahler’s ‘Das Lied von der Erde’ with Kathleen Ferrier and Peter Pears, a work whose premiere had been given, shortly after Mahler’s death, by Bruno Walter. In addition, in that year Glyndebourne brought Mozart’s ‘Figaro’ and Verdi’s ‘Macbeth’, Ferrier and Walter gave a song recital and Alec Guinness played Richard II.
The influence of Rudolf Bing was enormous, and later he went on to be a hugely important Director of the New York Metropolitan Opera, overseeing its transformation into the great modern house in the Lincoln Centre.
By the time I started to be aware of the Festival, in the late 1960s, Peter Diamand was the director. Like Bing he was a German Jew, born in Berlin in 1913, who fled the Nazis to Amsterdam. He was briefly imprisoned in a concentration camp in Holland, but escaped with his mother, and spent the war hiding in attics and other cramped spaces until liberation. Later he became a highly respected and well-connected arts administrator, and his time in charge of Edinburgh, from 1965 to 1978 is seen as a Golden Age. Somehow, he was able to reconcile the narrowness of civic parochialism in Edinburgh with the demands of an international festival. The connections he had made in his administrative career in the Netherlands allowed him to call in some of the world’s greatest musicians to Edinburgh, offering them almost carte blanche for artistic innovation. His encouragement of Sir Alexander Gibson with Scottish Opera and the SNO was legend, and his support for Arthur Oldham as director of the Edinburgh Festival Chorus was crucial for the development of that chorus into one of the best in the world.
There were two things which stood out for me in the Diamand era. One was that most of his events were one-offs – events which could not be seen anywhere else. As the music industry has changed over the years, the concerts, operas and plays we see nowadays in the Edinburgh International Festival are usually part of tours by orchestras and opera companies, or recitals which famous artists will also give elsewhere. In this Diamand period, almost all the concerts and operas were only able to be seen in Edinburgh. This had a big effect both on audience numbers and also on press coverage. Many of these events were literally once in a lifetime occasions, and I was particularly privileged to be around for most of this time. There were many wonders in this era, and here are a few examples. I saw ‘Carmen’ with Berganza, Freni and Domingo, conducted by Abbado, ‘Figaro’ with Fischer-Dieskau, Evans, Harper and Cotrubas, conducted by Barenboim, Brahms Requiem with Mathis, Fischer-Dieskau and Barenboim, Verdi’s Requiem with Giulini, with Arroyo, Cossotto, Pavarotti and Arie, Mahler 2 with Bernstein and Armstrong and Baker, Bruckner symphonies with Haitink and the Concertgebouw, more Mahler with Abbado, Verdi’s ‘Attila’ with Raimondi, Winterreise with Fischer-Dieskau and Barenboim, Brendel and Pollini and Richter in piano recitals, Vishnevskaya and Rostropovich with Tchaikovsky, Rostropovich playing Bach Cello Suites in St Cuthbert’s, Timothy West as King Lear in the round at the Assembly Hall, as well as the great ‘Three Estates’, also in the Assembly Hall, and Ravi Shankar playing late night ragas in the same venue. This was but the tip of the iceberg, and for a smallish city on the edge of Europe, it was unbelievable.
No-one could hope to follow this period without some sense of disappointment, but John Drummond, who was Festival Director from 1978 – 83, managed to do a splendid job. A man who was both easy to like but also easy to dislike, such was the acerbity of his tongue, he presided over a Festival which was coming to terms with the modern world. A lifelong lover of excellence, he provided us with some spectacular events. He brought the Rustaveli Theatre Company of Georgia to play Brecht and Shakespeare, engaged Bill Bryden to put on Mystery Plays in the Assembly Hall, and brought Elisabeth Schwarzkopf to the Freemason’s Hall in George Street to give masterclasses, in fact, the first ever televised masterclasses. With the incomparable Roger Vignoles as accompanist, she put six talented young singers through their paces, one of whom, dear reader, was me! Singing Leporello’s ‘Catalogue Aria’ from ‘Don Giovanni’ and Strauss’ bass song “Im Spätboot”, I was guided by Schwarzkopf to understand the niceties of performance at a high level. I loved it, as did the audience, and it was broadcast two years running on the BBC. I was 25, and still at music college, and it did wonders for my career. You can watch it below. Enjoy!
Two years later, and I was appearing at the Edinburgh Festival as a professional singer, playing the role of Sergeant of Archers in Puccini’s ‘Manon Lescaut’ with Scottish Opera, conducted by Sir Alexander Gibson, in the King’s Theatre.
In my humble opinion, when John Drummond left the Festival in 1983 to take over the BBC Proms (where I sang several times over the next 10 years or so), it lost something of its soul, under a succession of underwhelming directors. The Edinburgh Fringe became the monster it now is, and it rather eclipsed the International Festival. When people speak of the Edinburgh Festivals, as they do now, the original concept of a summer extravaganza of excellence and high art has been lost in the fog of comedy and weird shows. What was originally an add-on to the main festival (literally shows on the fringe of the official event), has become ‘The Festival’! There are indeed diamonds to be found in the loose stones, but you have to look hard.
I appeared once more in the official Festival, in the 90s, singing in a performance of Burns’ ‘Jolly Beggars’ in, I think, Hopetoun House. The fine comic Scots actor, Walter Carr, was involved, but I cannot find anything about the show either in my archives or those of the Festival. I only know I was there. If any of our readers can remember or have any details of the ‘Jolly Beggars’, please let us know at EMR, or leave a comment at the end of this article.
By this time, I was working almost exclusively outside Scotland, and became one of those Scottish singers who one met around the world, who never sang at home. As I have said many times in these Blogs, this was not our intention, but we were forced to sing elsewhere, simply because we were not invited to sing here.
After a while, I decided to remedy this absence by endeavouring to put on recitals every summer during the Festival, in that very Fringe which I was disparaging above. Using a number of accompanists, I sang firstly in the Canongate Kirk, and latterly at St Andrews and St George’s in George Street. Recently, I have tried to involve some of my St Andrews students in these Fringe events, and I hope I can carry this on in the future. I recently sang for the first time in St Michael’s Church in Slateford Road, with the wonderful Scottish mezzo, Beth Taylor, and Michał Gajzler at the piano, and we hope this venue can become more popular. I also sang in the early 2000s with Ludus Baroque in Bach’s B Minor Mass in the Canongate, which were splendid occasions.
Fergus Linehan, who has been director of the Edinburgh International Festival since 2015 has brought back some of the renown of the old days, with some spectacular concert performances in the Usher Hall of ‘Peter Grimes’ and Wagner’s ‘Ring Cycle’. I appeared in the programme for the first time in years at late night recitals in the Scottish National Portrait Gallery in 2017.
2021 was a weird year for all of us in the Arts, and so was the Edinburgh Festival. We wait to see what will happen next year.
In the next article, I will take a look at some of the other great festivals of the world in which I have participated, starting with Salzburg.
