Lammermuir Festival to charge for online concerts

The Navarra String Quartet will play two concerts at the Lammermuir Festival

We’d got a festival that we were pretty pleased with – quite a big one. Then we put the brakes on and stopped.” Looking back at the coronavirus shutdown in March, the Lammermuir Festival’s co-artistic director James Waters tells what feels like a familiar story, and one that applies right across the cultural world. “We would normally have launched the festival in mid-May, but then we thought we might be able to launch it in June. That sounds laughable in retrospect.”

At least Lammermuir’s September dates gave the team the slight advantage of time. “We thought: we will do whatever we can to hang on to doing something live, if that’s humanly possible,” Waters continues. “Because that’s why we exist – and we also have our relationships and loyalties to artists and audiences.”

Did they ever seriously consider cancelling entirely? Waters pauses. “No – genuinely no.” And though the practicalities may at times have appeared uncertain, there will indeed be a Lammermuir Festival in 2020. The audience experience will be entirely online, but events will still take place in East Lothian, in a single venue (Haddington’s Holy Trinity Episcopal Church), and bring together several artists who have become familiar to Lammermuir audiences in recent years.

“It was very clear that we’d have to work with people we knew really well,” says Waters, “because the likelihood was that we’d need to mess them around terribly. Of course, at the moment, everyone understands. And of course, we still try to behave well. But I think the programme we’ve ended up with it really rather good.”

It’s hard to disagree. There are previous Lammermuir artists in residence – cellist Philip Higham, guitarist Sean Shibe and pianist Roman Rabinovich (who plays a slimmed-down Beethoven’s Third Piano Concerto with musicians from the SCO) – plus two concerts from the Navarra String Quartet (regular visitors during the festival’s early years), and an evening focused around Purcell from the Dunedin Consort and soprano Mhairi Lawson. Waters is delighted, too, to continue the festival’s fruitful relationship with Scottish Opera (technical challenges meant it was looking uncertain at several points), with a live relay from Glasgow of Janáček’s The Diary of One Who Disappeared performed by tenor of the moment Nicky Spence.

It’s not quite the festival we’re used to, nor timed in quite the usual way, with four lunchtime concerts in its first week (broadcast live on BBC Radio 3 as well as via the festival’s website), followed by eight evening concerts in the second week recorded as live (though Scottish Opera’s Janáček is another live relay).

And significantly, it’s not free. “I feel quite strongly that the music business has got to stop giving everything away for nothing,” explains Waters. “I completely understand why people have done that during the pandemic, but at some point we have to stop.” It’s an entirely reasonable argument, especially since we’re almost certainly looking ahead to several months of disruption to “normal” ways of presenting events. And Lammermuir’s fees – £5 per single concert, or £33 for a festival pass to all 12 – are far from extortionate.

“We’re making the charges for two reasons,” Waters continues. “The obvious one is that we need the revenue. Budgets at the moment look ridiculous. Whoever wrote a budget without box office revenue? It’s not sustainable anywhere beyond this year, for anybody. But the other reason is that people value things they’ve paid for – even if they haven’t paid a lot – and they make them a priority, which is less likely for free events.”

He also feels, quite rightly, that there’s simply too much free stuff out there. “People are completely bamboozled by the massive amount of material available free online, and they need a way in. That can be through loyalty to a trusted organisation. We hope that our regular audience – and new audiences – will use us as a kind of musical spirit guide to select a coherent musical menu and, with a show each day for 11 days, to have some kind of feel of a festival journey with companions.”

With other music organisations no doubt considering similar ways of offering online performances, the Lammermuir Festival might just be setting the shape of things to come.

The Lammermuir Festival runs from 8-19 September, www.lammermuirfestival.co.uk

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