Tale of two cities

Eternal though they may seem, the Proms and the Edinburgh Festival are susceptible to change. Roger Wright will take over the former next year and Jonathan Mills has just assumed responsibility for the latter. New appointments do not necessarily mean that anything more up-to-date will happen, nor that the change will be for the better — the Bath Festival seems to have been all but destroyed by a recent and tactless overdose of innovation; but the signs from the two capitals are encouraging.

The Edinburgh Festival has traditionally been hostile to what is still called ‘early music’, the received wisdom being that the people of Scotland would not come to hear it. Quite why it was assumed that they would come instead to watch experimental dance projects (or if they didn’t it didn’t matter) has never been explained, but over the past weeks Mills has been presiding over full house after full house for his brand-new early music series. He was told not to take the risk, but, perhaps because he comes from Sydney and carries himself like Pushkin, he was able to take an outsider’s view, stare his advisers down and do it anyway. I am told that the atmosphere at the Festival has never been so good. I also appreciated his passionate words to us, just before we went on stage, about how he was hoping to put the great polyphonists back where they belonged, alongside the best musical minds of later epochs. I couldn’t agree more. We were able to dedicate an entire concert to Palestrina; Concerto Italiano dedicated a series of five concerts to Monteverdi.

By comparison the Proms has been more receptive to the less mainstream repertoires. Ever since the pioneering days of Sir William Glock’s directorship, in the 1960s and 1970s, music considered to be risky by normal concert-goers has been featured.