Australia is obviously the best training ground for a top job in the arts in Britain: after Michael Lynch, who has been Chief Execuctive of the South Bank Centre since 2002, and Loretta Tomasi, who recently took over as Chief Executive of English National Opera, news comes today that Brian McMaster’s successor in charge of the Edinburgh International Festival will be another Ozzie: Jonathan Mills, a 42-year-old contemporary composer and former artistic director of the Melbourne Arts Festival, was appointed yesterday to the post. And, like his fellow Ozzies, he takes on a somewhat poisoned chalice: McMaster’s programme last year took the festival £1m into the red, after running up losses of £850,000 on six new productions.
According to a report in today’s Independent, some high-profile local contenders – including the Barbican’s artistic director Graham Sheffield – “withdrew their interest because of concerns over the funding and the short timetable for takeover.”
But Mills, for his part, is keeping his chin up: “Maybe I’m a foolish optimist,” he is quoted as saying in The Indie, “but I think if one goes to the Scottish Executive and the city council aware of the many competing calls on public funding and present these festivals as critical to the definition of Edinburgh and its credentials as a creative community, one has a real change of exciting these people about the opportunity.”
To which we can only say, good luck!
In sadder news today, I read an obituary in the Daily Telegraph for a journalist I have shared a page with for four years on the Sunday Express: David Fingleton, the paper’s opera critic, has died, aged 64. Prior to his current role, he was music critic for the Daily Express from 1982 to 1998. The obituary tells us, “He went through a period of snoring loudly during opera performances, which generated a certain amount of ill-feeling among some members of the critical fraternity: Fingleton, however, took up the suggestion, put to him by a fellow critic, that sleep was a critical response.”
He worked almost to the last: he dictated his last review, for a production of The Marriage of Figaro, from his hospital bed, that ran on February 12, six days before his death.
