Friendship but no food

Last year my family thought making me a ‘Friend’ of the Bath Mozartfest would be a nice birthday present. The privileges included early booking, a free programme and an invitation to the ‘Friends’ and Patrons’ Lunch’, and they thought the last would be something I’d particularly appreciate as a chance to socialise with other music lovers (the intervals of Festival concerts are often not very good for doing this). But for reasons we never understood, the Festivals Box Office wouldn’t allow them to do so when they tried, as I recorded here.

This year they made a second attempt to do so and succeeded. I received a letter saying that I was a Friend of this year’s Festival and reminding me about the early booking and the free programme. The 2011 festival programme listed the benefits of becoming a Friend of the Mozartfest, which included an invitation to the ‘Friends’ and Patrons’ lunch’, above the application form. I was looking forward to hearing about the date of this social event for Friends, but on enquiry I find there isn’t going to be one this year ‘because there are other social events’ (to which, however, Friends are not automatically invited).

Now I realise that the point of being a Friend is to support the Festival financially, and that if my family had read the small print on the online application form (as opposed to the form in the 2011 programme) they would have found that the terms had changed in 2012, but I can’t help thinking it’s sneaky to quietly withdraw like this a significant benefit of Friendship that had been offered for some years, and to remove the social component altogether. Maybe a sponsor had pulled out or for some other reason the cost of lunch was unsustainable, but surely a less expensive alternative such as a drinks reception, or even coffee and cake at a Saturday morning concert, could have been arranged instead? Or the cost of the lowest level of Friendship reduced? In any case, once the lunch has been advertised in the 2011 festival programme as a benefit of 2012 Friendship alongside an application form, isn’t the Festival obliged to honour the deal, or at least provide some equivalent benefit?

Anyway there are still plenty of tickets for most of the best Festival concerts, though the ECO concert is sold out. Probably because it is in the Assembly Rooms, which can’t leave that much space for an audience. This is where the lack of a concert hall in Bath of the size of (say) the Wiltshire Music Centre makes itself felt.

[November 13th: I claimed my free programme at the Assembly Rooms last night, though not without difficulty as the programme distributors didn’t have instructions to give them to Friends of the Mozartfest. But in the programme a invitation to the ‘annual Friends’ and Patrons’ lunch’ is listed as among the benefits of Friendship. Have I just been unlucky in being a Friend in the one year when there wasn’t a lunch? And do they realise that what they say and do to a blogger gets around? ]

[The answer is that the lunch shouldn’t have been advertised and was dropped because very few people went to it. Probably this is the known Bathonian tendency to avoid mixing with people you don’t already know. It is all very well to say ‘you can eat with your friends after the concerts’ but that hasn’t happened to me in 15 years of going to the Mozartfest!]