The biggest in the world

The sensation of this year’s Edinburgh Festival has been the composer James MacMillan's diatribe against Scottish politicians  and the ignorance  shown of the arts  - classical music especially - by people who should know better.

The bragging about Edinburgh’s being the biggest arts festival in the world cuts no ice for someone of MacMillan's perception, and in this respect I wholeheartedly support him.  What matters is not size but quality, and the quality of the Edinburgh Festival is something that has conspicuously dwindled in recent years.

But apart from Brian McMaster’s valiant attempt to restore the standards and integrity of the days of Lord Harewood the festival has consistently failed to show what it is really capable of.  But the slide into mediocrity and irrelevance has proved inexorable.

The treating of Scottish Opera in recent years as no more than a commodity has resulted in the company’s transformation into little more than that.  The Royal Scottish National Orchestra’s aims seem increasingly to confuse musical ambition with routine richness of tone. The Edinburgh Festival Theatre, designed to be a musical  powerhouse, now falls far short of that.

Yet when MacMilan dares to say such things he is told he has got it wrong. Does he not know that the arts in Scotland are flourishing as never before?   The scale of the Edinburgh Festival proves the point.

But of course - as a musician of Macmillan’s astuteness knows very well - it does nothing of the sort. The festival is an increasingly sprawling mess in the middle of which the international festival, as it is now identified, struggles to seem something special.  But without genuinely creative contributions from Scottish Opera and the RSNO the old sense of exhilaration has evaporated, leaving the Scottish Chamber Orchestra and the ever-resourceful BBC SSO to fly the flag. But, as this year’s glossy programmes show, it is no longer enough.
17 August 2016