Stately stage set for festival

Over a sunny North Yorkshire lunchtime, John Warrack is reminiscing about memorable moments at the Ryedale Festival, which celebrates its 30th anniversary next week. We’re sitting outside the White Swan pub at Ampleforth and, aptly for the president of a festival that prides itself on its rural roots, he’s working his way through a Ploughman’s Lunch.

Most memorable moments... Warrack, musicologist and director of the Leeds Festival from 1978 to 1983, settles on a performance of Facade, Sir William Walton’s “Entertainment” setting poems by his friend Edith Sitwell (one dismissive review of the work’s 1923 premiere was headlined “Drivel They Paid to Hear”).

Warrack was a reciter at the Ryedale performance, and, some way into the work, the hall’s amplification system mysteriously picked up Radio 4 and the gallumphing theme-tune of The Archers added a little extra interest to Walton’s music. “And unfortunately it went on...”

The Archers is actually a pretty good reference point for the Ryedale Festival, based in rolling countryside that takes in Malton, Helmsley, Pickering and Kirkbymoorside. It’s an area of long views, charming churches and the stateliest of stately homes, many of them used as venues by the festival, which has classical music at its core but no proper concert hall to perform it in.

Robin Andrews, who became festival chairman last year (2010), has been taking me on a whistle-stop of some of these venues – Duncombe Park, round the corner from Rievaulx Abbey, grand and baroque; Hovingham Hall, between Helmsley and Malton, equally grand and best-known for its echoing Riding School hall.

We don’t quite make it to the grandest venue of all, Castle Howard, but I get the picture: the Ryedale Festival can do Superb Setting without too much effort. A friend who went to an operatic double bill at Hovingham during last year’s festival recalls: “Walking out into the gardens on a summer night in the interval really is lovely. And is that a real Poussain on the wall? Oh yes it is..”

With that in mind, I’m all set to suggest to Robin Andrews that the festival could be called “the Glyndebourne of the North”, but he gets in first with the phrase. He talks about the houses and the rural setting being central to its image and admits to being a “new broom”. As a former mining entrepreneur and resource financier, he has a shrewd grasp of future challenges in these cash-strapped times.

The festival, he explains, is financed in three main ways, each neatly accounting for a third of its income: public funding (Ryedale District Council and the Arts Council), ticket sales (10,000 or so per festival) and sponsorship and donations. Is there anything – the inevitable word in an arts context these days – corporate?

“They’ve been reticent about banging the drum for corporate sponsorship,” he says. “But we’re entering into a much tougher environment. There’s competition for the disposable pound; football clubs find that, theatres find it, everyone is finding it. And there’s competition for the musical pound from other festivals and music on Radio 3.

“This has been North Yorkshire’s best-kept secret in a way. Just imagine if you put this in Sussex or Suffolk or Kent: you’d hear a lot more about it. We operated at a loss last year and you can’t keep doing that. It’s a question of going out and making an occasion of each concert.”

Plenty of opportunities for that at this year’s festival, which takes “The Animal Kingdom” as its theme. Four-dozen events balance big names (Sir Thomas Allen, Joan Rodgers, Emma Kirkby, Howard Shelley) with community involvement (school choirs, Kirkbymoorside Brass Band). They range from the traditional (a popular concert including Prokofiev’s Peter and the Wolf, narrated by Andrews), through the enterprising (The Pig’s Tale, a community comic opera set in 14th century France), to the eyebrow-raisingly wacky.

For that, head on Sunday, July 24, for the Joan of Arc Hall at Botton Village, near Danby on the North York Moors – a place so small and remote that it’s hard to find even on an Ordnance Survey map: look for Stormy Hall, Wolf Pit and Honey Bee Nest. At 3pm it will see an eclectic cast of performers, including Ripon City Brass Band and the Men of Staithes Choir, tackle My Yorkshire Road.

It’s a new piece by the flamenco jazz guitarist Eduardo Niebla (born in Tangiers, grew up in Spain, now based in North Yorkshire) with lyrics by Man of Barnsley and Yorkshire Post columnist Ian McMillan (born in Darfield, grew up in Darfield, now based in Darfield). This “celebration of the North Yorkshire landscape” incorporates Niebla’s discoveries on a journey through the Dales and Moors and adds to the (surprisingly small) number of musical works inspired by the Yorkshire landscape: Delius’ North Country Sketches is the only one by a major composer to come instantly to mind.

The festival’s central event is a new production of The Cunning Little Vixen by Leos Janacek, the immensely engaging 1924 opera by a composer who found international fame only late in life. Based on a newspaper cartoon pointed out to Janacek by his housekeeper, it’s described by Christopher Glynn, the festival’s artistic director, as “the greatest of all operas about rural life”.

For all that its cast includes badgers and frogs, the work has no hint of Disneyesque kitsch or sentimentality. “Janacek knew about foxes,” says John Warrack. “He knew they bite the heads off chickens.” And he was fascinated by speech patterns, even in animals: “He wrote down how pigs grunt.”

The opera will be performed in Warrack’s new translation. So does he know Czech? “I know more than I did when I started,” he says and explains how the language’s stress on a word’s first syllable can create problems for translators. “And it might be one of the first operas where someone says ‘Why don’t you just bugger off?’ ‘Please go away’ didn’t seem quite right.”

Warrack’s experience of festivals goes back to the Fifties and Sixties, when he was music critic for the Daily and Sunday Telegraphs. Where today, every traffic island and car park seems to have its own festival, he remembers the days when they were thinner on the ground – Edinburgh, Cheltenham, York, Leeds, the Three Choirs... and Aldeburgh “where the artists were changing behind the piano and you went into this sort of village hall and there was Britten or Rostropovich or Sviatoslav Richter.”

So what, apart from great performances, makes a good festival? “Doing something you can’t find anywhere else, something rooted in the place where it’s taking place, rather than something that has no reason for being there.”

That was never the case with Ryedale. It started in a modest way, as the Helmsley Festival, and later changed its name. “In the early days, I remember people coming out of concerts and saying they’d really enjoyed themselves because they’d never been to a concert before,” says Warrack. “It was run on a shoestring, but the shoestring tended to snap from time to time.”

Journalist Martin Vander Weyer, business editor of The Spectator, was chairman from 1996 to 2002 and remembers both those early days, “when it relied more on local musicians with a few star names”, and a more expansionist era, with open-air concerts, circus tents and the odd rock band. “But every time we did one of these outdoor events, the weather was against us.”

The broadened scope helped bring in a wider audience. “There are a few people who come from the South of England and America, but if you analyse the postcodes, they mostly come from a 50-mile radius.”

As with all classical music outside London and bigger cities, a problem is ageing audiences. Robin Andrews puts the Ryedale Festival age range at “young-at-heart up to 75 or 80”, but there’s also a youth membership plan, with unsold free tickets for under-18s. The festival’s comparatively low ticket prices are designed as another inducement for audiences.

“It’s completely unelitist,” says Martin Wander Weyer. “It’s unlike some of those festivals in the South, where there are a lot of black ties. We long ago abandoned making it formal.”

Towards the end of his Ploughman’s Lunch, John Warrack looks back at the Leeds Festivals of 30 years ago. “I was very nervous going there to take over as director,” he says. “I thought they’d think I was a useless southerner with a silly voice. But they were very, very straightforward. I remember at a very early stage I made a hash of something. One of the councillors just said: ‘You’ll learn, lad.’”

* Ryedale Festival, July 15 to 31. Tel 01751 475777 or [email protected]