Mad days
Peter Phillips
Music festivals, like any public undertaking to do with ‘art’, put their planners on their mettle. As much creative thought can go into the format and the specially conceived theme of such things as into the concerts themselves. It is as if the artistic director is trying to rival his performers in the imagination stakes, so that I sometimes wonder whether all that thememaking, year after year, isn’t posing an intolerable burden on available resources. It can be almost painful to ask a festival what the special theme will be for next year, and to hear the squeezing of the juices as I am told that the director has suddenly become riveted by the idea of ‘Angels and Devils’ or ‘Forbidden Fruit’. What’s the matter with asking a group to perform the music they want to do as well as possible? But that would cut out the middleman.
One problem with this model is that in the end nothing very original comes from it. Groups like mine try to force a round product into a square hole — ‘Angels and Devils’ yielded a lot of second-rate music written in the name of the Archangel Michael; how exciting was that? — and an uneasy compromise is reached in the event. However, if the planning is really imaginative, exceptional things can happen and, although I don’t particularly enjoy being part of a circus, the festival called La Folle Journée de Nantes gives its public the time of its life.
The format dreamed up by René Martin, the perfect middleman, is to take a modern building containing a number of chamber music-size concert halls, dot shops and cafés about the place and make sure there is a spacious main hall for impromptu-seeming ‘happenings’. Then choose a theme with broadly populist implications, like ‘Russian music’, or ‘Monteverdi to Vivaldi’, or, this year, ‘The Harmony of the Nations’, and book about 250 leading musicians in the field. Ask them to perform for no more than 45 min utes, but ensure that they repeat their show(s) five or six times during a long weekend. With careful colour-coding and gaily named venues, you will then be able to stage something like seven different concerts at the same time, once every two hours or so throughout the day. The superficial effect is like that of a kaleidoscope of concerts; and people really do go a bit mad. In the Nantes version of this jamboree 150,000 seats were sold for three days of concert-making.
We tried to imagine such a thing taking place in an equivalent British town — say Nottingham or Northampton — and wondered why ironic laughter was the only response. Why couldn’t we do it? True, it takes a René Martin to think of it in the first place, and someone of his energy and intelligence in Britain would automatically be working in London. Then there is the problem of getting the idea off the ground in the first place. The first years of the Nantes festival must have been speculative in the extreme, since the success of it has depended on very large crowds for music which has not traditionally appealed to a mass market. Some serious underwriting must have gone on, which largely came from Nantes City Council. In the US, it would have come from a syndicate of private donors, after countless weeks and months of soliciting. But in both France and the US this would have been done in the expectation that eventually people would flock, the money paid back and the city benefited. In Britain, there is no comparable tradition of city councils taking such a risk, nor of private donors stepping up in sufficient numbers, and from the start the argument would be that the scheme was too elitist and would never work.
My fear is that that might be correct. We are so quick as a nation to leave that kind of arty responsibility to ‘the experts’ — the BBC, perhaps, or the Proms, or an organisation that has been up and running for decades and has unimpeachable credentials, that is tried and tested and lives in London. And what do I care that I come from a country in which a city like Nottingham doesn’t have ‘A Mad Day of Monteverdi to Vivaldi’? In fact, what do I care about what goes on in Nottingham? I can go to Nantes. Sigh.
Previous page
