The Edinburgh International Festival programme had just been announced and one pundit delivered a decisive, clenched-fist victory jab into the air and declaimed: “Yes! The orchestras are back!”
What was surprising was that the individual who did this is an undemonstrative character – who, moreover, belongs to a generation with which such pugnacious gestural rhetoric would not be associated.
In a way, exaggerated though it was, the demonstration reflected the concerns of many music-lovers that festival director Jonathan Mills, in pursuing with apparent relentlessness his interests in early music and the Baroque period, had effectively downgraded or sidelined the flagship orchestral programme.
Some commentators expressed the view that Mills was catering for minority or specialist interests. The other perspective – that the Australian festival director did not appear to have much interest in large-scale mainstream orchestral music – was expressed with equal concern and intensity. One former orchestra director codified the views of many when he said that the core and heart of the festival ought to be its Usher Hall programme.
All such comment has been suspended in Jonathan Mills’s fourth festival programme, where the Usher Hall occupies centre stage of the festival landscape. Great orchestras with great conductors, great programmes and great soloists will stream in, night upon night, over the three weeks of the event.
After the opening-night performance of John Adams’s modern oratorio El Nino, the wave begins with the RSNO and Steven Osborne in a fabulous programme of Americana with the veteran musician and conductor Gunther Schuller.
The next two nights are given over to the Finnish Radio Symphony Orchestra and its conductor Sakari Oramo. At last acknowledged as a major figure in his own right, Oramo brings incendiary symphonies by the still-underrated Dane Carl Nielsen.
The Finns are followed by the Cleveland Orchestra, America’s most refined and polished, who fill two nights and extraordinary programmes of music by Charles Ives, Bruckner, Brahms, Korngold, Alban Berg and Brahms, all under the direction of their music director Franz Welser-Most.
As the Clevelanders leave, the Russians move in, with Mikhail Pletnev conducting the Russian National Orchestra in Shostakovich’s great, and rather elliptical, final symphony, the 15th. This is preceded by the greatest of all Romantic violin concertos, Tchaikovsky’s, to be played by one of the most astounding violinists of the era, Vadim Repin. And so it rolls on, with two fantastic programmes from the Amsterdam-based Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra – with one of the best conductors in the world, the explosive Mariss Jansons, delivering what are sure to be incandescent performances of music by Stravinsky and Bartok, and Mahler’s massive Third Symphony occupying their second programme.
The Sydney Symphony Orchestra, with their chief Vladimir Ashkenazy, visit the festival with two programmes, each featuring new Australian music. The Minnesota Orchestra, which has acquired new status under Osmo Vanska’s direction, and which has just released a sensational new recording of Bruckner’s Fourth Symphony, will bring a programme of music by Barber, Elgar and Beethoven.
The Scottish orchestras (including Scottish Opera’s) are there with major programmes from chief conductors Francesco Corti, Stephane Deneve, Robin Ticciati and the awesome Donald Runnicles, who has two programmes with his BBC SSO. One of these links into the New World element of this year’s music programme; the other is Mahler’s Eighth Symphony, or the Symphony of a Thousand as it used to be called.
It’s a stunning programme in the Usher Hall – and there is more, much more, going on in the venue than is outlined here. But does it all mean, as some have suggested, that Jonathan Mills has relented on his early, experimental years where he explored origins and sources, and that he has returned to the mainstream?
There is an important point to be made here. People have read into and inferred from Mills’s first three years all manner of motivations and inspirations. We have restricted ourselves to observing that he was addressing an imbalance and filling a gap in festival music provision.
Mills has not leapt to the defence of his approach to programming. He has been too busy doing it to bother about his critics; but also he has carefully avoided saying anything that might imply criticism of his predecessor, Sir Brian McMaster, or, indeed, of festival programming over the past 30 years.
Now, however, with three years under his belt and some powerful new directions firmly established, he is open and candid about his purpose and his motivation. “I felt the urgent need, when I arrived here, to expand the territory of the music programme; and I felt it was important for a big reason,” he says. “The recorded archive of what is available in music, and the sum of the extraordinary research in musicology over the past 50 years, together with the expansion of the idea of performance practice, were all eventually and finally having an irreversible impact on the way in which we consider classical music and its contours.
“The hissing and farting of those very early adventures into trying to create a relationship with a viola da gamba or a baroque flute or a natural horn, which were embarrassing, turned into a group of musicians who were so expert and so masterful on these instruments – those bits of tube and those planks of wood – that they didn’t just make them sound audible and musical, but made then sound extraordinary. So the mellowness, the subtlety and individuality of those sounds could come to the fore; and the idea that one could express these musical shapes and understand things about them that we hadn’t really understood for 100 or so years became dominant.
“We never needed to hear Albinoni again, unless someone like Chiara Banchini came along and re-invigorated our relationship with it. We never again needed to hear half the repertoire of the past, particularly of the late Renaissance and the Baroque, unless a group of musicians came along to play it as though it was written yesterday; as though it was forged out of the heat of an inspiration that had occurred moments earlier and was fresh. In terms of festival programming, it was an opportunity waiting to happen – and necessary.
“More broadly, I also thought it important to reflect on what the Edinburgh International Festival was, and stood for, in its music programme. I’ve never accepted the idea that one should put limits on the programme. It should be international within Europe and beyond Europe.”
Clearly, with the musical parameters of the festival broadened, Mills now feels that the palate of festival-goers, like the palette of musical offerings, is so broad and so established that the floodgates of full-blooded orchestral music can be thrown open again. The result is a rich orchestral programme, as well as a broader music programme that has some fascinating strands which will be explored further on these pages in the coming weeks.
For more information, visit www.eif.co.uk.
