Hall is not well at EIF

Published on Tuesday 8 September 2009 19:10

IF THE Usher Hall series is the proud father of the Edinburgh International Festival music programme, why did so much of it feel like a neglected uncle this year? It's a question that's been nagging me since last month's opening night: a concert featuring Handel's mixed-bag oratorio Judas Maccabaeus. Not one of Handel's greatest works.

It came off, in the sense it drew a capacity crowd – the opening concert always does. But it was a weak and rather eccentric choice, like many other aspects of the ensuing Usher Hall programme which I'm not convinced got off so lightly.

Looking back, I'm conscious of an underlying reluctance to pin a fifth star on performances that almost made it, but not quite. There was one exception: Saturday's final night performance of Elgar's The Dream of Gerontius. Here was a concert that combined out-of-the-ordinary programming with excellence of delivery and a truly festive atmosphere, the last being fuelled by a cast of hundreds and the buzz of an excitable full house. But was it too little, too late?

Nothing else I saw in the Usher Hall quite matched it. How could Philippe Herreweghe screw up recitative cues in Mendelssohn's Elijah so badly? Why did Baiba Scride and Jan Vogler play Brahms's Double Concerto as if it were a first run-through? Who decided it was a good idea to commission Giorgio Battistelli to write the meandering waffle he produced for the Scottish Chamber Orchestra?

But the problem wasn't solely with the performances, it was a chain of consequences which led from questionable programming through variable quality of performances to a worrying pattern of variable attendances.

Might a correlation between these account for the Usher Hall programme's relatively low-key impact this year, especially compared to the robustness of the highly popular early evening Greyfriars' Bach series, where you had to fight for a seat half an hour before the show, and where the quality was consistent and exceptional?

Word had got around: Greyfriars is good. Equally active on the jungle telegraph were frequent questions about the ordinariness of the Usher Hall. Did people vote with their feet?

The question of audience figures is perhaps the most difficult to fathom, especially in the absence of detailed statistics. When I contacted the Festival last week, there was a reluctance to talk specific numbers, particularly in relation to the Usher Hall.

Indeed, writing in this newspaper on Saturday, Edinburgh International Festival director Jonathan Mills issued a statement about this year's overall box office that said about as little as he probably wanted it to say. "Our ticket sales have matched last year's record sales," was his broad brushstroke comment, which happened to be word-for-word what the Festival press office told me on Friday. In other words, the official line is conveniently hazy.

In other press statements, Mills continually promoted the anecdotal view that audiences have "enjoyed what they saw". I don't doubt either as being essentially truthful, but the vagueness of both comments is, I suspect, intentional. Catch-all evidence of the success of the Festival as a whole neatly avoids any undue focus on elements of the programme that might not have performed as spectacularly as others.

Indeed, anecdotes are all we have. But we have enough to suggest that audiences didn't swarm to a series that lacked cogency, supreme quality and consistent pulling power.

Picture the scene at last week's Donald Runnicles programme. I couldn't help but notice the appearance of former Festival director Brian McMaster, all but alone amid a sea of vacant seats like a ghost of Festivals past. There were other significant pockets of empty seats.

Why? Runnicles and the BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra have traditionally pulled in the Festival crowds. But this was an unspectacular programme of Webern, Brahms and Strauss. Not enough, it would seem, to whet sufficient appetites.

The same could be said of the Royal Scottish National Orchestra's Made in Scotland tribute to Sir Peter Maxwell Davies and James MacMillan – another lost opportunity. Rather than dredging up old works, a 50th birthday commission from MacMillan would have upped the ante, given that we've had so few of these in Scotland in recent years, as would the actual presence of Maxwell Davies.

Even where quality did strike, questions arise over context. Why bring the entire Hamburg State Opera all the way to Edinburgh, only to stick them on the Usher Hall platform in DJs to sing through Wagner's The Flying Dutchman, when one step further and a full-blown production might have set the operatic heather on fire?

And as for putting on Handel operas in concert, that's a hard sell, and according to The Scotsman colleagues who attended them, Rinaldo and Acis and Galatea (performed and recorded already this year in Scotland by the Dunedin Consort) had their fair share of empty seats.

Whatever the truth about Usher Hall ticket sales, so many factors converged to make this series a lot less memorable than its place in the Edinburgh International Festival deserves. And that's a dangerous state of affairs.

Is the problem money? If so, cut the duration down to two weeks and call in the best that money can buy. Or were there wider issues with Festival ticket sales that have yet to emerge? Why, for instance, are there reports of members of the Scottish Chamber Orchestra sent out to busk Fringe-style in St Andrew Square to boost Fireworks Concert tickets? Don't tell me these weren't selling.

In Saturday's article, Mills made a case for the festivals to capitalise on the forthcoming London Olympics and Glasgow's Commonwealth Games, stating that we have to give visitors a reason to head up to Edinburgh.

Part of that proposition has to be the offer of a product that is unique and of the highest international quality. If general impressions are correct, that wasn't the case this year at the heart of the music programme in the Usher Hall. It's too major a component to ignore.

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