RICHARD OSBORNE
FESTIVALS IN 2022
‘Normal service has been resumed,’ rejoices pianist Iain Burnside, artistic director of Ludlow’s annual English Song Weekend (8th-10th April). Being a prudent soul, he adds, ‘As I type these words with one hand, I cross the fingers of the other, muttering fervent prayers to the gods of viral variants.’
It would be an exaggeration to say that festivals – or ‘music meetings’, as such events were called before the Three Choirs Festival set up shop in Gloucester, Hereford and Worcester in the 1710s – have never had it so bad. But with the wreckage of COVID and Brexit strewn all about us, inflation once again raising its ugly mug above the parapet, and theatres, arts centres and churches, all key elements in the festival ecosystem, ‘going dark’ at an alarming rate, no one can pretend that these are propitious times for the arts in Britain.
Take my own local gaff, Windsor and Maidenhead, one of the country’s most affluent local authorities, which is proposing to reduce its arts funding to zero. Zilch – not a penny. Shades of Falstaff drinking in Windsor’s Garter Inn with barely a groat to his name.
It’s a move that suggests it was no accident that the celebrated Windsor Festival, founded by Yehudi Menuhin and Ian Hunter in 1969, was allowed to wither on the vine, or that in 2006 the town’s second-richest institution, Eton College, casually threw over a long and cherished tradition of hosting prestigious (and, to the music profession, lifesustaining) subscription concerts.
Some festivals are clearly struggling to release a 2022 programme. Others that came through the pandemic, their colours torn but visible above the fray, appear to be back with a bang.
Buxton, for instance, promises ‘the biggest, bravest, boldest line-up yet’. (The most recent festival I visited, back in 1987, seemed pretty big and bold, but I take the point.) Operas include a rare Donizetti, Rossini’s powerful and affecting realisation of Walter Scott’s lovely narrative poem The Lady of the Lake, and Violet, a new opera on the modish theme of time running out, by Tom Coult and Alice Birch. That’s also being seen at Aldeburgh, garaged last year but returning this June, firing on all cylinders.
Our summer opera festivals appear to be in reasonably rude health. Garsington has rather more revivals than usual; a chance perhaps for newcomers to hoover up tickets from disappointed regulars. But Longborough’s Wagner Ring cycle is back, on course and on stage, with Siegfried, while elsewhere Verdi’s Shakespeare is much favoured with new productions of Macbeth (the Grange Festival) and Otello (Grange Park Opera).
Glyndebourne’s three-month season offers operas by Mozart, Donizetti, Puccini and Poulenc and begins with a rarity, Ethel Smyth’s Cornish-set opera, The Wreckers. As I wrote here in June 2018, it’s a fascinating piece – Beecham and Bruno Walter both conducted it; Mahler planned to stage it – that is both a precursor to and a
Handlebar moustache: Elgar statue by Oliver Dixon, Hereford Cathedral
possible model for Britten’s Peter Grimes. Curiously, Glyndebourne will be reviving it in French, the language of the original libretto – despite the existence of a perfectly good English translation by Dame Ethyl herself, and a team that looks worryingly light on Francophone singers, let alone an orchestra who understand French.
No such language problems will trouble Opera Holland Park’s staging of Mark Adamo’s remaking of Louisa May Alcott’s Little Women which has been charming American audiences these past 20 years. It’s good news, too, that the wonderful old (1951) Wexford Festival in Southern Ireland is back, tempting true believers with operatic rarities by Halévy, Félicien David and Dvořák. (If you haven’t visited, be advised it’s better to fly to Dublin, with its many attendant delights, than risk the Irish Sea in all its autumnal hullabaloo.)
Rare Dvořák will also be opening this year’s Three Choirs Festival in Hereford. When Dvořák declined the 1888 Birmingham Festival committee’s invitation to set local priest John Henry Newman’s poem The Dream of Gerontius, he wrote a Requiem instead, leaving the way open for Edward Elgar to take up the idea 12 years later. Hence some bright spark’s idea to open the 2022 Hereford Festival with the Dvořák and end with the Elgar.
Three Choirs sceptic George Bernard Shaw claimed to loathe the Dvořák, amazed that ‘any critic should mistake this paltry piece of orchestral and harmonic confectionery for a serious composition’. Yet I suspect that his objections were less to do with Dvořák’s all too personable music than with an age in which, as he put it, ‘Requiems are offered as a sort of treat, whether anybody is dead or not.’
Still, where are we going to hear the Dvořák nowadays, except at a festival?
A list of music festivals and their currently available performance and booking dates can be found on the Oldie website