Michael White
Writer and critic
‘My idea of paradise would be the opening weekend of the Aldeburgh Festival in perpetuity – but it wouldn’t work in perpetuity because by definition festivals are something that you can’t have every day.’
Humpty Dumpty in the Alice stories says that when he makes a word work overtime he pays it extra. And if humpty were still with us, as opposed to scrambled egg, he would be paying serious money into the account of ‘festival’: a word so worked to death these days that it means everything and nothing.
At the Southbank Centre not a week goes by without a ‘festival’ of some kind, knocked together as a marketing device to make you feel you’re missing out if you buy into one event and not the total package. And that’s phoney. Because proper festivals are more than just a string of concerts.
They involve some special interaction between places, people and ideas. And as
the word implies, they’re festive: a time set aside to celebrate, a refuge from the everyday that meets – as John Mills, a past director of the Edinburgh Festival, always said – ‘a profound need in humanity’.
It’s no accident that the grand, old British festivals begun in the 19th century were often in industrial towns like Leeds where people needed temporary relief from tough lives. And it’s also no accident that many of the significant 20th-century fixtures started just after World War II, to provide what the emblematic Festival of Britain called a ‘Tonic to the Nation’ after years of conflict.
Standardly, the tonic of a festival involves a licence to be playful: to do something crazy, risky and absurd – which is perhaps the modern, secular equivalent of something present in the ancient, spiritual origins of festivals giving participants a licence to be fools for God. And festivals can be a tonic even when they’re serious.
One of least frivolous I know is the
Bath Mozartfest, which puts on core classical repertoire in seemly Georgian venues like the Bath Assembly Rooms.
It’s ultra-civilised, perfection-minded and, as its director Amelia Freedman admits, ‘not what you’d call wild. I like to stretch the audience, but it’s not my brief to programme Xenakis’.
It is, however, her brief to programme joy. As she says, ‘I want people to emerge from my concerts thinking “I feel better for this”’. And they do, which is why her concerts play to packed houses with no tricks, no stunts, just quality and the delight of being in so beautiful a city. The experience is therapeutic, and if only you could get it on the NHS the nation would be healthier.
That said, Bath isn’t necessarily a precedent for everywhere. As Christopher Glynn, who runs the Ryedale Festival, insists: ‘You have to ask yourself why this festival, in this place, at this time?’. And for Ryedale, where events are spread across vast tracts of North Yorkshire and involve Armadas of 4x4s crawling in single file down unadopted roads to the churches, monasteries and stately homes where they take place, these are important questions.
Ryedale is one of the loveliest and least ruined parts of rural Britain, but no one knows where it is. So it needs some selling and a sense of purpose: which for Glynn means ‘bringing top artists to a part of Yorkshire that won’t otherwise get them, and creating something unique. Those
‘You have to ask yourself why this festival, in this place, at this time?’
objectives can conflict, because top artists might only want to give you what they’re touring generally at the time. But you have to try. And you end up going with what smells right’.
Something that smelled positively fragrant was an idea Glynn came up with several years ago – to have the actor Jeremy Irons read TS Eliot’s Four Quartets, each one in a different venue and back-to-back with the heath Quartet playing late Beethoven. Venue One was Castle howard, where Irons launched his career in the 1980s TV adaptation of Brideshead Revisited. And it proved one of those benchmark festival events where everything comes together in a perfect fit. No one who followed the sequence around from venue to venue like pilgrims on a quest will ever forget it. And it was a paradigm example of what festivals can do that normal concerts can’t.
The notion of a quest is something that comes up a lot in festival lore. ‘It’s a
cliché to talk about taking your audience on a journey,’ says Roger Wright who runs the Aldeburgh Festival, ‘but that’s literally what happens as they drive around the Suffolk lanes to Aldeburgh projects. Most people come for several days and follow things through. And ideally that’s what happens with the artists too.
‘There are certain performers whose range of interests, ambitions and partnerships can’t be contained by normal concert structures, and they’re better represented in the flexibility of a festival. Inviting someone like Barbara hannigan or Patricia Kopatchinskaja to come and play a single concert and then leave makes no sense. You need to give them space and time. And Aldeburgh is the place for that.’
In fact, Aldeburgh is the place for so many things, it’s arguably the best of festivals. As Wordsworth should have said, Earth hasn’t anything to show more fair than Aldeburgh beach under the aching vastness of a blue East Anglian sky, with seagull obbligato as you stroll in sunshine to a morning concert in the parish church. But just as overwhelming is the spirit of a venture set up by Benjamin Britten and Peter Pears and still recognisable as their creation – even though it’s now a bigger, slicker enterprise than they imagined, with very few surviving witnesses to their world.
‘Britten and Pears are always looking over my shoulder,’ says Wright, ‘but not in an oppressive way. And it’s easy to be respectful of their vision. They gave us wonderful venues [chiefly Snape Maltings, rising like a ship out of the flatness of the Suffolk reed-beds] but they also handed down an audience that wants to be challenged and knows the brand.’
Reciprocally, the knowing Aldeburgh audience can be a challenge for some other, smaller fixtures in East Anglia – like North Norfolk Festival, whose co-director Barry Cheeseman regularly finds himself on the receiving end of ‘people who come up from Aldeburgh and are keen to tell us how we’re doing by comparison’. Not that he lets it bother him, being someone with a strong belief in what he does.
North Norfolk is a boutique venture focused on a church idyllically remote from anywhere, half way between
Kings Lynn and Norwich and some 40 miles from either. People travel serious distances for (often very) serious concerts. And to make the journeys worthwhile, Cheeseman organises his events in pairs: something at 4pm, something at 7, and a supper in between.
‘The supper helps create a feeling of community,’ he says, ‘and I lean on the artists to stay and mingle – which they don’t always want to do, but they have to be house-trained. I don’t want them thinking they’re Jessye Norman when they’re not.’
The kind of artists Cheeseman books are chosen for a kind of excellence that isn’t Jessye Norman-like. ‘If I had endless money,’ he imagines, ‘and Joyce Didonato had a spare day on the way to Salzburg,