At Festival time in Edinburgh, it can feel as though all humanity is there
would I ask her? No. And not because I don’t adore her but because she’d be topheavy for us. We like stars, but superstars would overwhelm us. We’re the size we are. I’d never want us to be any bigger.’
Contrast Edinburgh: a festival that, with its fringe, has reached gargantuan proportions and where the current director Fergus Linehan talks about the community he’s addressing as ‘global – because humanity is a community.’
At Festival time in Edinburgh it can indeed feel as though all humanity is there, racing between venues to collect as much festivity as possible before the human condition intervenes and they collapse. But for adrenaline junkies, there’s nothing more exciting. As Linehan says, ‘People come here expecting to find a cross-section of what’s going on culturally throughout the world, and to step into a broader definition of who they are – which is why we’re more a receiving festival than an initiating one, pulling things in from Tokyo, Berlin, wherever.
‘But at the same time, like any festival, we have to be fundamentally supported by the place we’re in, and reflect back aspects of life here. And we do. It’s a myth that Edinburgh is a festival foisted on a city against its will. Sixty per cent of our audience is local; and if you include the Fringe, nearly 90 per cent of Edinburgh residents go to something at festival time. There’s no resentment that I see.’
It’s a different problem for a festival in London where, unless you’re the BBC Proms, you’re more likely to be swallowed up by the city than foisting anything upon it. The solution, if there is one,
is to focus tightly on a part of London with a distinctive character – like Spitalfields, which started as a festival to draw attention to a great but crumbling building, hawksmoor’s mighty Christ Church, and still draws its energy from the peculiar tensions in the nearby streets of early Georgian architecture, straddling the vast wealth of the City and the shabby but dynamic multicultures of the East End.
For a different sort of focus there’s hampstead Arts Festival, created by the American Eric Usadi as what he calls ‘a reboot of something that had fallen by the wayside’ – having lacked the focus to be visible against everything else going on in the metropolis. In its new form, the HAF has a cleaner, sharper profile with nicheinterest programmes played by celebrated artists (often local residents) in venues that endorse that old idea of hampstead as the home of London’s hyper-literate intelligentsia. So far, it’s working.
Niche is necessary when your festival runs in a town so culturally rich it doesn’t need you – as is the case with Oxford’s International Piano Festival, which has been running for 21 years to a formula that director Marios Papadopoulos says he has no intention of changing: ‘I think we’ve got it right. We combine public performances with an academy that runs alongside. Distinguished pianists give concerts by night and masterclasses to advanced students by day. And there’s a residential element based on St hilda’s College where all the participants, and a lot of the audience, stay and take their meals. So there’s a sense of community, discussions over breakfast – sometimes heated but that’s fine. It’s a discerning audience: we throw the ball at them, they throw it back.’ Just what you would expect from Oxford.
What you can expect from Cumnock, though, is harder to predict. A mining
‘It’s a discerning audience: we throw the ball at them, they throw it back’