A whimper from the Edinburgh Festival
NewsHugh Kerr’s verdict on the 2022 Festival in Edinburgh Music Review on this morning’s press conference is fairly dispiriting:
Fergus bows out with a bang or a whimper?
Fergus launched the Festival programme at 9.30 am to around 30 hacks or arts journalists as we are more properly known, dwindling print circulation newspapers were represented as were the new normal, online music blogs or magazines like the Edinburgh Music Review. With print circulations slumping to ever lower figures I predict we will be the only show in town soon. Fergus ran through the programme with the aid of his support staff from classical music, theatre and dance. He didn’t take questions, but I did get a ten minute interview with him afterwards as well as a good discussion with the classical music associate director. As for Fergus he told me he was going to Australia to rest with his Australian wife and family but would look for a new job soon.
This is the 75th Edinburgh Festival and Fergus reminded us that the Festival began out of the rubble of the war and today the 75th Festival was taking place in the shadow of the war in Ukraine. Of course the Festival had already acted to sever its links with Valery Gergiev who was its President. Gergiev is a close confidant of Putin and it’s no surprise that he was dispatched, but Fergus reassured me that there would be no further Russian censorship of the Festival programme.
The first Festival also came out of and was dominated by opera, Rudolf Bing the first festival director had come from the Met and Glyndebourne and made opera a feature of the programme. This continued until recently, particularly under the leadership of Brian McMaster. The opera programme began getting thinner under the directorship of Jonathan Mills, so much so that Tim Ashley of the Guardian said during his time “the Edinburgh Festival can no longer be recognised as a festival of international repute as far as opera is concerned”. Fergus Linehan the outgoing festival director did have a vintage opera year five years ago to celebrate the 70th anniversary of the festival. Sadly this year, opera is the poor relation with only one staged opera…
Read on here.
And here.
Correction: Rudolf Bing came to Edinburgh from Glyndebourne, co-founded the Festival in 1947 and left for the Met in 1949.