an open letter to Alasdair Nicolson, future artistic director of the Bath Festival

Dear Alasdair,

I await your arrival next year as new director of the Bath International Music Festival with interest. I know that you will have already started planning your first Festival, but as a Festival-goer of some fifteen years standing, may I tell you about some things I hope to see?

Establish primacy
Bath now promotes itself as a ‘Festival City’ with a clutch of other festivals competing for attention: including the Mozartfest and festivals of film, literature (adult and children’s), comedy, Shakespeare, Jane Austen and J. S. Bach. The International Music Festival needs to work to keep its profile. One way would be to aim to reverse a change that took place a couple of years ago when the length of the Festival was reduced by five or six days (which resulted amongst other things in the loss of the jazz weekend). It is now barely any longer than some of the other festivals. I’m also not sure that the inconsistency of calling it both the ‘International Music Festival’ and the ‘MusicFest’ does it any favours. And ditch that logo that looks as if a fly has got squashed on the paper!

Street Publicity
It used to be impossible not to notice when the Festival was on; there were displays on the Festival themes all over the city in shop windows (for which prizes were awarded). Recently it’s just been some slender and inconspicuous banners near the Guildhall – bring back the banner across Milsom St. (as the Literature Festival is currently doing), and if the Council tries to tell you that you’re only allowed a banner there for a week at a time, stand up to them!

It’s not just music
Please keep the multimedia events (such as ‘On the Edge of Life’ at the BRSLI in Queen Square) going, as people are often willing to try something different at festivals and these can provide some of the most memorable occasions. Some years ago there were late-night concerts where the audience were seated less formally, and, while the Festival still does folk music, Indian classical music is performed much less frequently than it once was. And the Festival used to have events that didn’t involve music at all, many of which were not expensive to put on. For example, Kirsten Elliott’s sell-out walking tours of Bath, which have now been snapped up by the Literature Festival. Please give some thought to reviving this side of the Festival.

Know your audience
At most Festival concerts I’ve been to, I’ve been invited to complete a questionnaire. But this questionnaire has assumed that I am a visitor to the city, to the extent that some questions are impossible to answer if you live there. (‘How long are you staying in Bath?’ followed by some multiple choice boxes, for example.) Please remember that you have a local audience too, and try to find out more about us and who are the potential Festival-goers you aren’t reaching. This leads on to my next point:

Woo the young
The Festival has some events specifically for children, but they rarely seem to be making the transition into attending adult concerts. At any rate when I take my elder children (now aged 12 and 10) to Festival concerts, they are often the only children present. Sadly, I know of children with music scholarships at local schools who’ve never attended a Festival concert. Perhaps that says something about their parents, but surely there is a natural constituency out there which could be reached, maybe by promoting the cheaper children’s tickets via schools or the various children’s choirs which have recently sprung up?

In fact my children are sometimes the only people under about 35 at Festival concerts, so there are other age groups needing to be encouraged to come. I am not too pessimistic about the death of the audiences: like the Russian priest who said that he was not worried that his congregation consisted only of babushkas, because as time passed a new generation of babushkas would appear. But those empty seats could be filled by more people under 50!

Scheduling
I’ve noticed some curious scheduling clashes creeping in in recent years. Some examples: a large orchestral concert two days before the ‘opening-night’ party, a performance by talented pupils at one of the major music schools which was in a midweek lunchtime slot when local children of the same age couldn’t go, a choir singing madrigals in the Pump Room while the firework display was going on close by, and the opening night procession having to squeeze through a gap in some roadworks. Which reminds me, you’ve probably already discovered that Bath’s streets are very frequently dug up, and the timetables put out for doing this are a fiction and not to be relied on. Don’t be fooled!

Use social media
I’m one of a thousand or so people who ‘like’ the Festival on Facebook and get updates about it; there were about a dozen during the last Festival. But there is more that it could do with social networking tools. A few years ago it would have been a good idea to make some concerts Facebook ‘events’, so people could say they were going and invite their friends over Facebook. Social media keep changing so I shan’t make definite suggestions – just try to use what’s popular at the moment to reach people.

Invite the best
The Festival’s reputation is a huge asset and it should be able to draw really big names, as well as giving opportunities to early-career artists. Don’t let the list of performers be too closely defined by your own circle of personal contacts, distinguished though some of them may be.

Revive the Bath Festival Chorus
I think your predecessor wasn’t at all interested in this; it never performed under her directorship, after several years when its appearances had become increasingly sporadic. But in its final season it was broadcast on Radio 3 and gave a concert on its own conducted by James MacMillan. Many of those who took part then are still singing in Bath, including some of the city’s best amateur singers, and we have a number of excellent choir trainers in the area. The Festival Chorus ticked the boxes of involving the local community and performing contemporary music. And I see that under your direction the St. Magnus Festival had a chorus of ‘100 singers from all parts of Orkney’, so surely we can put something similar together in Somerset. However, if the Festival Chorus were restarted, it should be properly promoted with a website, and vacancies for singers should be advertised.

And many of us, especially families, would love to see the return of the opening party with fireworks in front of the Royal Crescent, even if in our case it means picking bits of cardboard casing out of our garden for weeks afterwards! But I realise we are in a time of austerity.

Indeed, I know that some of what I’m asking for might cost more than you can really budget for at present, but that isn’t true of all of it. I hope also that this all doesn’t just sound like a string of requests to go back to an imagined ‘golden age’ in the last century, because there have been many other changes to the Festival which I haven’t regretted or doubtless even noticed! And I expect you have some new ideas that haven’t been tried here before, which I look forward to seeing in action. In the meantime I wish you all the best of luck as you prepare to take over.

Yours, Virginia Knight