Have festival, will fund

As I write, the curtain is about to rise on the fifteenth Lammermuir Festival, taking place across villages and small towns east of Edinburgh (5-16 September). The programme features Scottish Opera’s production of Britten’s Albert Herring and chamber music from ensembles and soloists including the Maxwell Quartet, the Van Baerle Trio from Amsterdam, the Gesualdo Six and pianists Jeremy Denk, Paul Lewis and Steven Osborne. Larger ensembles include the Dunedin Consort, Royal Northern Sinfonia and Concerto Copenhagen, and repertoire ranges from viol consort songs by Gibbons and Lawes to a tango evening and a performance of Stockhausen’s Stimmung.

It is a festival that has been planned with skill and confidence, giving the impression that no expense has been spared in offering a primarily local audience a musical feast. Yet just a year ago Lammermuir grabbed headlines in its opening week with a very public cri de coeur, issuing a statement explaining that the 2023 festival had been turned down for funding by Creative Scotland (CS), and as a result its long-term future was under threat.

What really rankled was that after turning down Lammermuir’s first funding application on the grounds that they were prioritising activity that took place earlier in the year, CS encouraged the festival to apply again, and then again after their second application was judged not to meet statutory criteria for Fair Work (paying everyone the national living wage). Rejection of their third funding application, on a criterion which CS’s own music department assessor considered the festival to have met, came just 16 days before the start of the festival. 

A year on from that crisis, artistic director James Waters is generous in his appreciation of CS’s position, acknowledging that ‘while last year was devastating for us and we were pretty baffled by the process, the government is treating CS unbelievably badly, and they are being forced to make the most impossible decisions. Their resources have been stretched beyond capacity since the pandemic by applications for funding from organisations that had never previously asked for help.’ Waters and his colleagues on Lammermuir’s board were frustrated that they had to dig so deep into their reserves to pay last year’s bills, but they kept talking to CS and the result was a contribution to the 2024 and 2025 festivals – though at a considerably lower level than before. 

‘We also talked a lot to our audience last year; they are very loyal and have been very supportive. We mounted a fundraising campaign that has helped to plug the gaps, and we have strategically hiked ticket prices for this year: increasing the top price quite a lot, pushing the middle a little – and keeping the bottom price where it was.’ An increase in membership of the festival’s Friends organisation led to a rise in early booking during their restricted sales period, and Waters feared this might mean a fall in public booking. It didn’t; when we spoke, he said they had already significantly beaten last year’s ticket sales.

What they did not do, he adds, is ‘safetify’ the programme. ‘We came to the conclusion that the way through this was to carry on doing what we do, putting on high-quality events that the audience seems to enjoy; that will unlock stable and increased audiences, enable us to charge higher prices, and attract loyal and philanthropic donation.’

Other festival directors have taken a similar approach to the current difficult conditions. Presteigne Festival benefits from its situation right on the Welsh border, which means that it qualifies for grants from both the English and Welsh arts councils, but with money so tight, support is no longer a given. ‘The Arts Council of Wales (ACW) tells us arts festivals are incredibly important to them,’ says artistic director George Vass, ‘and we have had the same liaison officer for 24 years, it's a proper relationship and she will go into battle for us, so we are very, very fortunate. This year we benefited from some money from the previous government’s Shared Prosperity Fund, which Powys County Council decided should be reserved for arts organisations, but it’s not for our programme, it’s for development and evaluation. 

‘Making sure we can pay for what we actually do is hard work for our very small team. For example, Arts Council England used to have eight application deadlines through the year but now there are just four, and one of them for 2025 was on the last day of our 2024 festival.’

A USP of the festival is its professional chamber orchestra of freelance players, which rehearses and performs a phenomenal programme of non-standard, predominantly contemporary repertoire over the festival weekend. Funding cuts over the past few years have threatened its existence, but they have been counteracted by a new scheme enabling supporters to fund individual chairs. This builds on the friendships that develop, often over many years, between the visiting musicians and local residents who offer hospitality.

Taking place over August bank holiday weekend, Presteigne had a bumper year for ticket sales, with 84 per cent seat occupancy over five days of concerts, which included 13 world premieres and work by 15 living composers, including composer-in-residence Richard Blackford and newer voices such as James B Wilson, Lara Poë, Nathan James Dearden and Sarah Frances Jenkins. The festival’s own George Vass Commission Fund was set up in 2017 to celebrate the artistic director’s 60th birthday and 25th year in post, and is already an important resource for commissioning major new works; long-standing relationships with trusts and foundations with specific remits, such as The Elmley Foundation, the Colwinston Charitable Trust, the Royal Philharmonic Society and the Vaughan Williams Foundation, also help to support Presteigne’s distinctive programming.

Alexis Paterson, who has just stepped down as chief executive of the Three Choirs Festival (TCF) after nine years at the helm, also stresses the importance of such organisations in helping to commission the new music that is the lifeblood of classical music. ‘TCF is fortunate to have had good reserves that have enabled it to weather the past few years,’ she says, adding that it is also challenged by high fixed costs such as the fees it pays to its main cathedral venues each year and the ever-increasing cost of installing concert seating. ‘But there have also been a couple of generous recent legacies, one of them specifically for new music.'

TCF’s audiences have not quite returned to pre-pandemic levels, and they are changing, Paterson says, with a fall in advance ticket purchases for this year’s Worcester festival but, tantalisingly, a vast increase in walk-ups. ‘The funding situation is just awful, there is not enough of it and a lot of key players have lost major grants or sponsorship, so there are many people fishing in little ponds. But the scale and format of TCF has changed many times over its three-century history; there certainly is a determination and expectation that it will continue.’

Festivals Mean Business 4, the latest report from a research programme to provide key data on the size, scope and social and economic impact of the festivals sector, will be published in October. More information from the British Arts Festivals Association