EDINBURGH FESTIVAL
Festival music
Good, solid middlebrow stuff
Rupert Christiansen suggests it is time for something completely different Having suffered a bashing in the press over the last few years for its feeble music programme, Frank Dunlop's regime has finally reeled off and come up with a very respectable set of offerings. As this is Dun- lop's last season as director, it's probably too late to redeem himself, and there's still not enough novelty or glamour to make me ache to be walking Princes Street; but at least the scandalous dullness which dead- ened 1988 and 1989 has been banished.
For what one prays will be the last time, the opera has been vitiated by Edinburgh's miserable lack of a decent theatre. At one end of the city is the Playhouse, a dreadful old barn which holds over three thousand, but has neither charm, grandeur nor good backstage facilities to recommend it. Both the Kirov and the Bolshoi have been parked there this month, but it is not a place in which anything smaller-scale than Aida can make much of an impact. At the other end is the poky King's Theatre, acoustically hard and just too small for any- one to make any money out of filling it. This Scylla and Charybdis can in future be steered past if the Empire Theatre on Nicolson Street, currently serving time as a bingo hall, is renovated and developed. The City Fathers have made all the right noises and signed various documents, but a substantial public appeal will be needed to make up the necessary funds, and so many schemes have previously been announced and then disintegrated that at this stage one should only allow two muted cheers. This said, the best has been made of two bad jobs. Over the coming week, the King's boasts the curious spectacle of Alicia Alon- so, aged 'about 70' for several years now, in the National Ballet of Cuba's production of Dido Abbandonada (25 August) and Scot- tish Opera's new look at La clemenza di Tito (29, 31 August), directed by the Amer- ican whizzkid Stephen Wadsworth. At the Playhouse is Mart's four-and-a-half-hour Ring Around the Ring, a dance version of Wagner's tetralogy performed by the Deutsche Oper of Berlin (28, 29 August), replete with high-kitsch, high-tech effects that Bayreuth has never dreamed of. Oh for Balanchine, a row of girls in black leo- tards and 20 minutes of real choreography.
Escape from all this son et lumiere is offered at the Usher Hall, a grim enough establishment, but an efficient and practi- cal one. Two of the world's finest sopranos — Felicity Lott (25 August) and Jessye Norman (31 August) — are slated for bal- samic lieder recitals, and the Czech Phil- harmonic Orchestra will be playing three concerts (28, 30, 31 August) of music in which they are uniquely and natively expert. But casting an eye over the entire Festival schedule, a sense of comfortable and predictable familiarity sets in. We've had an opening gala of dear Yehudi Menuhin conducting dear Mozart, another War Requiem, more Mozart from the English Chamber Orchestra, three safe evenings of 20th-century classics from the Philharmonia, and on 29 August it will be Hogwood's authentic tea-time Vivaldi. Fine, but you can buy the records, hear it in London or Glasgow, save yourself the trouble. There has been virtually no new or even post-war music at all, nothing rich and strange to wake you up at the morning chamber concerts, in fact nothing that isn't floating in the shallow end, buoyed by the rubber ring of box-office safety.
Does this sound churlish? Were the Fes- tivals in 1950s and 1960s really taking more risks and boldly licking the knife-edge of culture? Is it only because I was a wide- eyed, know-nothing kid that in my teens Edinburgh during the Festival seemed to buzz and fizzle as it no longer does? Has the burgeoning free enterprise of the Fringe sapped the energy and resources of the state-supported official list, as Dunlop's outburst last week sourly implied? Or is it a matter of bad planning, not enough money and the wrong people in charge?
These are all questions I hope the Festi- val's new director Brian McMaster will address. I can answer none of them, but because I owe the Festival so much fun and joy, and because Edinburgh is by far the most beautiful city in the land, I impudent- ly offer him the following hints for revitalis- ing the present formula.
The Festival must originate more of its own work, rather than simply importing extant shows. If finance dictates that the only way of doing this is to co-produce, then Edinburgh must make sure that it isn't a meekly sleeping partner in the arrange- ments. Longer-term relationships must be developed with artists of the calibre of Giulini, Berganza and Fischer-Dieskau, who used to come back year after year because they/had been treated so well and listened to Sd appreciatively. The program- ming must become more thematically coherent (why, for instance, has the nettle of Prokofiev's centenary not been grasped more firmly this year?) and more eclectic (how about someone on the stage of the Usher Hall who doesn't wear a dinner jack- et and isn't Nigel Kennedy?). Less of East- ern Europe — often one feels that acts from that part of the world have been booked simply because of the poor things' exchange rate — more of Asia and the Americas, perhaps.
It's easy to talk like this. I'm sure that Dunlop could justifiably blame a lot of recent shortcomings on the straitened cir- cumstances of the City Fathers and the chill winds of Thatcherism. But Edin- burgh's traditional position as a cultural centre has been shaken by Glasgow's daz- zling performance over the last decade and its laurels are wilting. What the Festi- val needs as much as a new opera house and another half-million in its budget is the will and the imagination to do something amazingly and beautifully different.
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