Price is right for Sydney Festival attendees

Acts such as Sylvie Guillem thrilled the crowds.

On a warm Sydney evening the light is fading. More than 80,000 people are spread over the Domain listening to the Sydney Symphony's clarinettist slide into the opening bars of Gershwin's Rhapsody in Blue. And, perhaps, Fergus Linehan is starting to relax.

The concert in the park is one of the main free offerings of the Sydney Festival and, for debutant festival director Linehan, the free programmes are key drivers in making Sydneysiders engage with this year's event.

As the concert progresses, it is obvious the audience is totally involved. The performance is not just background music for a picnic but something to be relished.

This is the result Linehan had hoped for. A Dubliner with a theatre festival background, he wanted to associate the arts with summer and enjoyment. "There is a connection between hedonism and art," he says.

But the three-week event is not all lollipops. Linehan says festival programming must have substance and deliver something that he is interested in and can stand behind.

His priority is to introduce artists and performances that provoke an immediate emotional frisson - "the wow response".

The night I watched, Sylvie Guillem and the George Piper Dances delivered a heart-stopping programme by choreographer Russell Maliphant. And those who saw the fado singer Mariza and Elvis Costello and the Brodsky Quartet said it was equally impressive.

There was the quirky and the cerebral, like the work of sculptor Erwin Wurm, and the moving and accessible Tenant to Tenant exhibition of photography by, and of, the inhabitants of one of Sydney's most notorious tower blocks.

Shakespeare's Twelfth Night was performed in Russian by an all-male Moscow cast, and Britain's Knee High Theatre moved in on Tristan and Yseult. American pianist Christopher O'Riley provided a lively and rapturously received recital which mixed Shostakovich with transcriptions of Radiohead.

But the best stocked line-up means little unless the public is won over, and here Linehan believes the big issue is pricing. He does not subscribe to the view that the wider audience is intimidated or hostile to the arts. But there is a price bar that people will baulk at even if they can afford it.

The Sydney Festival has a 30-year history and is heavily sponsored but has to answer the same broad questions in attracting an audience as any other arts event.

Linehan says there is an audience who will never be orchestra subscribers but who could be drawn by a simple pricing structure - not one hedged with conditions like the typical student rush.

As part of his strategy he introduced a series of seven shorter works from five different countries, with all tickets at $25. It was a roaring success, and a series of free talks by various artists won standing-only crowds.

The festival also staged a series of 10 events at far-flung Parramatta but Linehan stressed this was not any attempt to take art to the suburbs, merely a means of making the festival physically more accessible to those from the city's western reaches.

He said there was no proselytising going on - although I believe it would be a peculiarly insulated artist who did not feel some of Sydney's buzz.

Linehan says the Sydney event is audience-focused and its aim is to create an experience for the city.

The Domain audience seemed to feel that and probably would have done so even before British conductor Wayne Marshall followed an American in Paris with the obligatory 1812 Overture with cannon and fireworks.

* John Gardner visited the Sydney Festival 2006 as a guest of the festival, the New South Wales Tourist Board and the Shangri-La Hotel.