Socially distanced festivals

One of the biggest casualties of the COVID-19 crisis has been the summer music festival season, but a few organisations have reinvented themselves to offer something new to their audiences. Clare Stevens reports

Above: Clare Stevens Photo: Alex Ramsay

Left: Glyndebourne Garden Concert Photo: James Bellorini Open up the websites of most of the UK’s summer music festivals, from Latitude to Green Man, Wilderness to Camp Bestival, Aldeburgh to Edinburgh, and you will find notifications that they have been cancelled or postponed until 2021.

Some have been able to offer alternative experiences for 2020. Fans of Glastonbury could celebrate its 50 birthday from the comfort of their sofa instead of squelching about in the mud at Worthy Farm, thanks to the BBC #Glastoathome experience on TV, radio and online; while the rich social media programme of the virtual Three Choirs Festival included new interviews, archive images, shared memories, a virtual choir and the imaginative #ThreeChoirsPremieresLeague (a Twitter tournament in which a choral work by Francis Pott premiered in 1999 defeated the Finzi Clarinet Concerto and Vaughan Williams’s Tallis Fantasia).

Festivals taking place towards the end of the summer have had a bit more time to formulate their plans. Eleven concerts and literary events were specially filmed to create Presteigne Digital, which took place online 24-27 August and included seven brand new pieces – all but two of the commissioned works that should have been performed at the festival in the small Welsh town over Bank Holiday weekend. Support from the festival’s family of funders, has enabled artistic director George Vass and his team to re-purpose grants so that by the end of the year, they will have employed over 60 freelance performers, composers and artists taking part in Presteigne Digital 2020, an inaugural Winter Festival Weekend and the Presteigne Festival Orchestra’s debut commercial recording.

Quickly out of the starting blocks in creating a new sort of festival for these strange times was the vocal ensemble Voces8, whose ‘Live from London’ series of Saturday evening choral concerts began on 1 August. Season tickets for the series, costing £80, went on sale early in the summer, with e-tickets offering access to individual concerts also available. I Fagiolini, The Swingle Singers, The Gesualdo Six and Chanticleer from San Francisco are among the groups taking part in the 10 performances, most of which are filmed under strict COVID-19-safe rules in the Gresham Centre, the repurposed Wren church that is Voces8’s Central London base.

The performances take place in real time, with pre-recorded introductions and links and are followed a few minutes later by live chat, taking the place of the post-concert chats with their fans that Voces8 love. In their first chat they explained how standing further apart than normal to comply with physical distancing guidance is quite challenging for an ensemble that relies so much on breathing as one and being aware of every nuance of one another’s bodies as they perform.

Singer-songwriter Laura Marling is part of a fortnight of live concerts that conclude this summer’s BBC Proms season, most of which has consisted of archive broadcasts. On 6 September live at the Royal Albert Hall, Marling will be performing songs from her recent Mercury-nominated album Song for Our Daughter, as well as selected songs from her previous albums, with pioneering string group 12 Ensemble, in brand-new string arrangements by American multiinstrumentalist and producer Rob Moose.

The two weeks of live Proms began on 28 August and include seven new commissions, from Hannah Kendall, Aziza Sadikova, Jay Capperauld, Gavin Higgins, Thomas Adès, Andrea Tarrodi and Richard Ayres, highlighting the Proms’ commitment to contemporary music. The line-up of performers includes pianists Benjamin Grosvenor, Stephen Hough and Mitsuko Uchida, violinist Nicola Benedetti, cellist Sheku Kanneh-Mason, sitar player Anoushka Shankar, organist Jonathan Scott and conductors Sir Simon Rattle and Esa-Pekka Salonen, as well as the BBC Singers and the BBC’s own orchestras in London, Glasgow and Cardiff. While it was not possible to have an audience present in the Royal Albert Hall, every live Prom has been broadcast on BBC Radio 3 and for the first time ever, all live Proms performances have been filmed and will be available to watch via BBC Four (Thursday,

Top left: Virgin Arena concept image

Above: Voces8 chat to their viewers after a live-streamed concert

Above right: The last fortnight of the BBC Proms season will include concerts performed in an empty Royal Albert Hall Photo: BBC Sanjeet Riat

Friday, Sunday) orlive-streamed on BBC iPlayer (Saturday, Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday).

Ask any musician, however, and they’ll tell you that a performance is not the same without a visible audience. London’s Wigmore Hall was all set to follow up its hugely successful series of chamber recitals, broadcast from an empty hall, with a second series including a distanced audience, when the government moved the goalposts in response to a perceptible rise in cases of the virus and forbade indoor performances with an audience in England. Britten-Pears Arts (BPA) was in a similar situation, announcing a late summer series of 45-minute recitals with reduced audience and no intervals in its Snape Maltings Concert Hall, only to have to unannounce it two hours later in response to the government’s new restrictions. Pre- and postconcert social distancing in the vast open spaces of its riverside site in the Suffolk countryside would have been easy, and BPA’s plans had included requiring audience members to wear face coverings and issuing no printed tickets or programmes; CEO Roger Wright and his team were understandably disappointed when the series could not go ahead, and at the time of writing were still considering their next steps.

Further north at Gosforth Park in Newcastleupon-Tyne, the Virgin Money Unity Arena claims to be Europe’s first socially distanced music venue, and is hosting a series of events that get as close as possible to the summer music festival experience. The line-up includes The Libertines, Ronan Keating, Van Morrison,

Alfie Boe, and a Fleetwood Mac tribute act, and the audience is invited to purchase an e-ticket online and drive to the site, where they collect their pre-ordered food and drink and join a socially distanced queue to be escorted to their own ‘personal platform’ from which to view the concert. At the end of each show they are reminded to keep their distance from other concert-goers and are escorted back to their cars.

But it seems to be opera companies that have really got their act together and produced the most imaginative performances for reduced and distanced audiences.

From 19-27 September English National Opera will host drive-in performances of Puccini’s La Bohème at Alexandra Palace, North London. The performers will be on a raised and covered stage, with large screens to the side also relaying the performance so that all audience members get a great view. Microphones and a wireless sound system will enable the audience to hear the music no matter where they are parked – and those who don’t have a car can book an Uber Box, a static car that adheres to social distancing, or come on a bicycle.

Opera Holland Park has experimented with several different types of outdoor performance in its west London venue, including an evening of light music and operetta with solo singers and a distanced ensemble of strings, woodwind and percussion from the City of London Sinfonia, and a relaxed family performance of Gilbert & Sullivan’s The Pirates of Penzance.

In addition to opening its beautiful gardens to the public from July, Glyndebourne has presented a short season of concerts with the Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment and opera highlights with the London Philharmonic Orchestra and singers including ISM board member Nicky Spence, on a purpose-built stage near the lake, with distanced audience seating and plenty of time and space to enjoy the traditional picnic interval.

Grange Park Opera in Surrey, however, has gone one better and actually commissioned a new opera specifically for this situation. With music written in six weeks by 29-year-old Alex Woolf and a libretto by David Pountney, A Feast in the Time of Plague will be presented in the Theatre in the Woods on 12 and 13 September. It is loosely based on a fragmentary tale by Pushkin dating from 1830 and features a cast of virtuoso solo singers, including Susan Bullock, Claire Booth, Wynne Evans and Simon Keenlyside, playing the 12 characters who, as Pountney explains, arrive for the feast voluntarily, but do not all leave voluntarily: ‘They capture the defiance and solidarity that we have all experienced during these strange times,’ he says. ‘The virus exposes truths about all of us in surprising ways. A Feast in the Time of Plague captures this – as well as the essential lesson that we must carry on laughing.’

Clare Stevens is a freelance writer and editor

presteignefestival.com/2020-presteigne-digital

voces8.foundation/livefromlondon bbc.co.uk/proms brittenpearsarts.org virginmoneyunityarena.com operahollandpark.com eno.org/whats-on/eno-drive-live glyndebourne.com grangeparkopera.co.uk

Top: Roger Wright at Snape Maltings Photo: Britten Pears Arts

Above: Alison Langer performs at an Opera Holland Park distanced concert Photo: Ali Wright