A friend emails me about a forthcoming concert of traditional music at the Bath Festival this year. It’s not uncommon for performers to advertise their appearance at the festival in advance of the release of the official programme. Probably with a bit of constructive searching I could already find out quite a lot of what’s going to be on. But I visited the Festival website just to check whether the programme was out yet (today – February 23rd).
It isn’t, but I learn from the website that tickets are already on sale for Maxim Vengerov and a couple of other concerts. This seems to have been done rather quietly – we are on the mailing list for the Bath Festival and have heard nothing!
[24 May: It turned out that tickets for a few concerts went on sale early as part of a promotion by the Bath Chronicle. I went to the Vengerov concert which was originally going to go out live on Radio 3, before he had to scale back his involvement in it because of a shoulder injury. It was decided late on to record it instead. Had it gone out live, the radio audience would have had a bit of a wait, because at 7.40 we were still filing in large numbers into the Forum – an art deco former cinema. The main reason for the hold-up seems to have been that people had forgotten, or didn’t know, that there’s less parking in the surrounding area at the moment than there has been in the past! An account of the performances will follow later.]