Ben Johnson: ‘We mustn't lose our authenticity’

In November last year the trustees of the Cambridge Summer Music Festival announced the appointment of tenor Ben Johnson to the role of festival director. With the festival programme released this week, I sat down with Johnson to find out more about his plans for the upcoming 2023 festival and for the organisation’s wider future, plus how his extensive experience as a performer and festival co-founder is informing his approach his new role.

What can audiences expect from the upcoming Cambridge Summer Music festival?

There's going to be a great variety of performances across 15 venues. The festival is the oldest music festival in Cambridge and was designed to fill the spaces that were left empty in the summer holidays. Originally this was the college chapels and now on top of that, there are other venues across Cambridge and beyond which come into the mix.

We're returning to King's College Chapel this year after a long absence and that's really exciting. King's chapel will hold the Britten Sinfonia and the Bach Choir for a performance of Duruflé’s Requiem and a piece called Vision of a Garden. Receiving its second performance at the festival, this piece includes a libretto written by choir member Peter Johnstone using diaries written for him by the nurses of Addenbrooke’s Hospital in Cambridge where he was treated for Covid. We'll have the Addenbrooke’s Hospital Choir coming to join us for that as well. The other big event I'm excited about is a performance of all of Handel’s Coronation Anthems with David Bates and La Nuova Musica in Trinity College, the college attended by King Charles III.

Away from that, we have chamber music with Nicholas Daniels and the Britten Oboe Quartet and solo piano in West Road with Martin James Bartlett. We also have amazing soprano Masabane Cecilia Rangwanasha who's coming to do a recital with pianist Simon Lepper in a new venue called the Pembroke Auditorium.

The festival will also bring opera to local country house Childerley Hall, and this year Wild Arts will present L’Elisir d’Amore. I've also introduced jazz for the first time, with two jazz concerts on Sunday, one in Childerley, with Ian Farrington’s Art Deco Trio and one with guitarist John Etheridge in the basement at the Cambridge Union, which is where the Cambridge footlights started.

I've tried to make each programme suit the venue, as opposed to just putting on a festival and then forcing the music in there.

Matching these performances to the venues and working across so many different spaces sounds like quite a complex task – how did you approach it?

I spent a lot of the time in Cambridge after my appointment in 2022. I know Cambridge as a performer, I’ve performed there a lot and sang solos with King's in the past, but I didn't know the inside of the other venues. I had my musical ideas of what I might like to present so I spent a lot of time on the ground just getting a feel. Of course, we haven't used all the venues we would like to have used, there are still places I want to use next year, but it’s been a great joy to spend more time in Cambridge.

This is your first festival season in the role. How has your experience as a performer and as co-founder of the Norfolk-based Southrepps Classical Music Festival informed your approach to running this year’s festival?

I learned about running a festival through running the Southrepps Classical Music Festival. My friends and I started that back in 2008 and we learned as we went. That was interesting because there was a mixture of audiences; there were some people who are interested in classical music, but a lot of the local community in the village knew nothing of classical music, really, and they were curious. So, I had a fresh audience and seeing what worked was really interesting.

The greatest musical experiences of my life all share something that's hard to put into words. I was very lucky to work with people like Sir Colin Davis, Sir Charles Mackerras and Jonathan Miller. These people brought a great authenticity to what they do, and I feel we're in danger as a business - without trying to get too political or controversial - of losing that authenticity. We seem to sometimes think that we need to do all sorts of other things to please the world, which I don’t know that the world is always asking of us. I feel like we're questioning ourselves from the inside out, and though much needs to change and a lot does need to be put under the microscope, we mustn't lose our authenticity.

What I found with the audience in Southrepps is that, even as uninitiated classical listeners, my goodness, they can sniff out if it's not authentic. The people I’ve brought to the Cambridge Summer Music Festival are people that I feel have that authenticity. I haven't booked an artist whose work I don't know; everyone who's coming, I've heard. Even if I don't know them personally, I know their performances and so each performer has got the seal of approval from me. I believe that if I hang on to those virtues, the audience will pick them up as well. If there are people I'm interested in who I don't know well, I will get to know them and get to know their performances before I book them, and I certainly won’t book somebody or a group just because they're doing well elsewhere. I need to filter it myself and understand what my reaction to their work is, to find if I can really feel that authenticity that I'm talking about. It's hard to describe, sometimes it's just a feeling that there’s something special here which will be picked up by the audience.

I think being a musician gives you certain insights, I hope that it helps in some ways and that the musicians who come to perform appreciate that, as a performer myself, I know their needs. But I'm not striving to do something completely different, I'm learning a skill from those who run festivals as their as their profession. Being a musician isn't a superpower that means you can just do it differently; you learn from other great festivals.

Announcing your new appointment, you said you are ‘particularly mindful of the value and privilege of providing world class music in the historic and beautiful city of Cambridge.’ How do you plan to make use of this privilege in this upcoming season?

There are several layers to it. The first thing I would say is that you've got to get your main job right first. I've been really thrilled with the with the festival team who I got on with instantly. Even in the interviews, our chairman Henry Edmundson is a great visionary and he's got a really great board of trustees. They've been very supportive of my vision, which is to put on an international level festival - that's what we need to do.

Elements of education and working with young people are very, very important (in Southrepps, I started a young artist programme for emerging talent back in 2014). So, this year I'm giving a masterclass to some up-and-coming young singers and we've got a composing workshop for young composers of school age where they'll get to submit their works and have a day workshopping them and hearing their music played by musicians - that'll be invaluable. We are also offering under 25s half price seats and, for some concerts, free tickets, so that younger people or even university student age are not going to have to pay full price, which is important, and I think that will grow.

It's still early days for me, but I'd like to get more into the community of Cambridge as I'm learning more about it, but it seemed to me my first priority was to get our day job steady and stabilized, then that would be a platform that we can build upon.

From an admin perspective, juggling so many roles must be a challenging – how do you ensure each project receives enough attention?

It's been this way for me since I was at school, and I think actually it often happens early. I've always been organising my own concerts. In a way, I think you enjoy your own projects slightly more because there's more invested.

I ended up studying the voice, but I think the side of my brain that enjoyed curating and designing programmes, which is something I love to do for myself, always remained. It was inevitable that I was going to need to do more than just be a performer, it's just part of my DNA.

The 2023 festival programme will be going public later this month - what are you most looking forward to in the upcoming festival?

This will be the first time I see the festival in action so I will learn a great deal this year by seeing the audiences, I'm very keen to meet them and see how it works. That will give me a great idea of the audience that we're serving and also perhaps areas of the festival that we want to focus on.

I’m excited about everything because I haven't booked anything that I don't already know is already fantastic. We have a great event in the Botanic Gardens which attracts thousands of people on Wednesday afternoons when the sun is shining. It’s great for families and we've got some great acts coming. I want to be at these concerts and meet the people there. I think a lot of people will come to them who wouldn't consider coming to anything else so there's a target audience for me. I've said to everyone on the team that we need to be there and we need to let them know there are other performances that they can come to.

The main point is that I haven't picked anything that I don't have faith in, so I'm excited. The best bit really is the build-up and then when the festival happens, the great feeling is watching people react to the things that you've dreamt up. With the enthusiasm that you've got, seeing people like it too gives you such a tremendous buzz, it’s like nothing else.

The Cambridge Summer Music Festival will run from 5 to 29 July 2023 in and around the city of Cambridge. You can find the full programme here.