With youthful verve, MICHAEL TUMELTY relishes the thought of a festival which is sometimes consumed by the size of its bigger, international brother
CLEARLY, there is not another festival under the sun quite like it. There is, on the one hand,
the beefy, muscular, Edinburgh International Festival in August. And, on the other, there is the emaciated, threadbare farrago of Mayfest
in Glasgow.
Straddling both cities, occupying the same time slot as the Edinburgh Festival, and positively brimming with activity, innovation, invention, and sheer elan, is the Festival of British Youth Orchestras, whose programme for this year - bursting at the seams with youth and music - was announced in Edinburgh yesterday.
They are coming from everywhere in the UK - from the Highlands to Southampton - and from not a few places abroad (Ireland, Denmark, the Netherlands and Italy). Approximately 2500 young musicians, grouped in 36 ensembles and orchestras, will perform 58 concerts in Edinburgh and Glasgow over the three weeks of the festival in August.
But there is more to it than a heap of numbers. They may be young, but they are the cream of their many and varied crops. They do not stint on the ambitiousness of what they play.
The National Youth Orchestra of Ireland, for example, will open the Glasgow strand of
the festival on August 9 with a programme that culminates
in Tchaikovsky's demanding Sixth Symphony, the Pathetique, while, on the same night, the Edinburgh strand will be launched by the Jeugdorkest Nederland, who will close their concert with Stravinsky's spectacular Firebird Suite.
But, the big boys of the
mainstream aside, the almost breathtaking ambitiousness of what this array of musical youth will undertake leaps out of the programme when you look at the new and recent music the orchestras will play - music towards which they are steered by the promoting body, the National Association of Youth Orchestras. It represents a level of invention and audacity that professional orchestras, which have more eyes on the box office than they do on
their conductors, wouldn't
dare countenance.
There will be five brand new works, seven entries in the Boosey and Hawkes Award scheme (specially designed to encourage the performance of music by composers from the B&H stable) and an astonishing repertoire of works by 31 other composers from the present century, ranging from Leonard Bernstein and Kurt Weill to a crop of resident Scots (William Sweeney, Edward Harper, and Haflidi Hallgrimsson).
The Glasgow festival, as usual, will be staged in the Stevenson Hall of the RSAMD. In Edinburgh, the festival has burst its banks and is overflowing from the Central Hall at Tollcross into the Royal Museum of Scotland, Cafe Graffiti, St Giles', and the Canongate Kirk.
The whole show is being put together for less than #70,000. ''And not only are we one of the few arts organisations that is solvent,'' says Carol Main, director of the National Association of Youth Orchestras, ''but we have a healthy, if modest, surplus in the bank.''
Not that she wouldn't welcome a business sponsor for the Glasgow side of the operation. The Glasgow festival costs #30,000 and receives just #3000 from the city council. Box office and charitable trusts provide a great deal of the remaining monies.
In Edinburgh however,
there is large, sustained, and significant business sponsorship from big outfits which rather puts Glasgow to shame: Standard Life, now in its fourth year of sponsorship at #5000
a year, and the John Lewis Partnership, which has sponsored the festival every year since it started in 1980, and which has just entered a new three-year agreement worth #10,000 a year.
n Any Glasgow business interested in getting involved should contact Carol Main at NAYO (0131 539 1087).
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