Alex Wood
on the work of Norman Drummond
Also on this page:
CalMad
The ferry operator is at it again
Terry Brotherstone
insists the festival director is
doing a good job
Also on this page:
Hugh Kerr
who very much doubts it
Finnish Radio Symphony Orchestra at the Usher Hall
For the first time Jonathan Mills, the festival director, has decided to programme the Usher Hall on a Sunday evening. On the basis of the half-empty attendance he may think twice about repeating the experiment. A pity: it was a very good concert.
The Finnish Radio Orchestra under its dynamic young conductor Sakari Oramo is a splendid orchestra with large, lush wind sections. I visited Finland a number of times when I was a member of the European Parliament and was very impressed with the country’s music education policy and in particular its Sibelius Academy.
We in Scotland are rightly proud of the Royal Academy of Music and Drama and experiments such as the Big Noise at Raploch which is showing what intensive music education can achieve in a deprived area. However in most Scottish schools music education is underfunded and marginalised. Clearly there are no such problems in Finland.
The orchestra played a Helios overture and symphony No4 by Nielson. I have never heard the fourth played better.
The icing on the cake was a powerful recital of Wagner’s Wesendonck Lieder by the great German mezzo-soprano Petra Lang. Written for a woman who may have been Wagner’s lover and whose husband was one of his main sponsors, it is a sublime example of Wagner’s craft as a great composer. Petra Lang sang it with beauty and power; it was a pity the hall was half empty.
Rear Window
Tom Wright
1923-2002
We disagreed about many things. His smoking was a trial: add to death and taxes, Tom’s unfiltered Navy strength cigarettes. A lot of the time I kept my ears open and my mouth shut. My job was to prompt, cue, quiz and contest, a role I was glad to play. Tom respected only those who opposesd him and only then if their arguments were convincing. He didn’t change his mind often, but when he did it was with the greatest good grace and a tinge of wistfulness for whatever tenet had just been abandoned…Tested in battle, nothing about life, or death, could really daunt him.
Islay McLeod’s Islay
III. Portnahaven
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In defence of Jonathan Mills
Terry Brotherstone
The clarity with which the Scottish Review argues the case against the misnamed Creative Scotland’s diversion of resources away from creative artists towards the commercialisation agenda is in stark contrast with the confused case Hugh Kerr makes against Jonathan Mills’ directorship of the Edinburgh International Festival.
Kerr’s musical tastes differ from the director’s, I know. I’ve heard him twice on the question at the public lecture sessions the University and College Union Scotland has organised (supported by the Edinburgh NUJ branch and this year by the Musicians Union in Scotland) to give Mills and his colleagues the opportunity to engage with trade unionists and others about the festival’s themes and its wider aims and educational activities.
But to conflate the real crisis of the festival caused by persistent underfunding and now the threat posed by the Brokeback Coalition’s ideological approach to public expenditure cuts with Kerr’s own dislike of Mill’s thematic programming (which has never excluded non-theme-related performances) and the unproven claim that ‘standards’ are dropping is, to put it mildly, deeply unhelpful.
Kerr uses the methods of the Daily Mail when he cites a festivalgoer as saying that public funding for the festival may not be justified when nursery school budgets are being cut. I’m sure he’ll find a man on Princes Street who supports the death penalty, but he wouldn’t cite that as evidence for its return. And the mother faced with education cuts would no doubt say the same whoever was festival director.
Kerr cites opera critic Tim Ashley (apparently also in casual conversation: what sort of journalism is this?) to the effect that Edinburgh is no longer a quality international festival. Well, how long since it was…in opera terms? Though there is now a music theatre, no opera house was ever built. And even previous director, Brian McMaster – whom, for anti-Mills purposes, Kerr now eulogises – never transformed the staged-opera programme, put on some less successful as well some great shows, and mainly contributed through elevating the concert-performed opera to a new level of legitimacy.
Kerr disparages this year’s operas: ‘Porgy and Bess’ (an ‘updated…slick production’); ‘Montezuma’ (disliked by the New York Times); and ‘Bliss’ (Kerr’s own negative judgement based on seeing some You Tube extracts). But the afore-cited Ashley, in his Guardian review, was full of praise for the excellent ‘Porgy’, which was so ‘operatic’ indeed that it could have done with subtitles. And, though he severely criticised the erratic – but never less than intriguing – ‘Montezuma’ (which was acclaimed by a near-capacity audience when I was there), he described the piece in a programme note as ‘one of the most unusual achievements of the 18th-century imagination’.
The point is that the Edinburgh Festival is not a simply an international opera festival, an international music festival, an international theatre festival or an international dance festival. (Kerr, though his animus is against Mills as festival director in general, says nothing of some truly excellent and challenging dance and theatre.) Edinburgh is uniquely international in its existence as a festival in one – remarkably well-suited – place at one time each year: it is in its totality, its juxtapositions, its crossovers that it scores as no other comparable event can.
Arguably more radically than any director since John Drummond in a very different age, Mills is rethinking the significance of this central concept and promoting it in practice. Drummond, moreover, could afford to focus on Europe and its cultural heritage; Mills grasps that, for all the importance of that tradition, a festival critically relevant to the 21st century must embrace the cultural traditions of the wider world.
Some engagement with this agenda should surely be the starting point for criticism of specific events and performances. Mills’ Hub lecture sessions, some of which illuminate a year’s particular ‘theme’, encourage this. Without such engagement, the rejection of ‘themes’ per se looks like a subjective justification for Kerr’s profoundly unhelpful amalgamation of the real threat to the festival of public spending cuts and his personal opinion that Mills’ directorship has seen a decline in standards.
Whatever differences there may be about particular productions and performances, Mills’ approach to the festival attempts to locate it in the real world of capitalist globalisation as the first festival in 1947 arose from the ashes to which Word War II had reduced European civilisation.
