Brian Rudman: Time's short: it's fest or famine

COMMENT

With Wellington's March 2004 International Arts Festival offering an unappetising smorgasbord of shows for a second season in a row, the chance for Auckland's fledgling festival to steal a march on - and a customer or three off - its venerable rival beckons.

But with AK05 just 14 months away, such a coup is going to take a herculean effort. The cynic's line is that it will be effort enough to stage a festival of any sort in that time, let alone a crowd-puller.

But having heard that sort of rationale for last September's AK03 short-comings, I doubt such excuses are going to wash a second time. My bet is if the organisers don't deliver a festival really worthy of the name in February 2005, they might as well give up. If only because by then, the goodwill from sponsors and backers, in particular the Auckland City Council, will have run out.

It is disappointing, but not surprising, that the inaugural festival made a loss of $270,000, mainly from disastrous ticket sales for two dud shows. One was a strange Irish line-dance-with-violins sort of show, bought, sight unseen, out of Canada. The other was the doomed-to-failure exercise of putting the New Zealand Symphony Orchestra and Auckland Philharmonia on stage together to play loud, but obscure works, at exorbitant prices.

Let's just hope that Auckland City, having backed this enterprise through its traumatic birthing trials, will bail it out one last time.

After AK03 I suggested a priority for the next festival will have to be to turn Auckland into the home of AK05 in the way that in past years we were the home of the America's Cup. By that I meant the whole community would have to get involved.

Of course to achieve that, the festival has to offer a much richer selection of events, paid and free, than it did in September. And at lunchtime as well as in the evening.

Festival organisers would also do well to consider gift horses when offered them. I talk here of the open offer, which has been on the table for nearly two years, from the organisers of the Naxos Records-sponsored International Music Festival New Zealand, which ran annually for five years until September 2001.

Klaus Heymann, the owner of Naxos Records, the classical recording world's runaway success label, lives part of each year in Auckland, and set up his festival as a way of sharing his recording stars with the people of his new home town.

Over the five years of the festival he paraded a wonderful collection of stars through the Auckland Town Hall: solo instrumentalists such as Maria Kliegel and Jeno Jando; the Kodaly, Vlach and Auer Quartets; and New Zealand musicians such as Diedre Irons and Tower Voices New Zealand.

We heard new repertoire and CDs were recorded for worldwide release.

But for reasons I cannot fathom, the organisers of the planned Auckland Festival rebuffed approaches from Naxos to become part of the new larger venture.

Mr Heymann spent more than $160,000 underwriting his festival. Auckland City's contribution averaged out at about $10,000 a season, which went straight back to the council as part-payment for hall rentals.

In March last year, following his decision to suspend his festival because of lack of support from local councils, Mr Heymann said he found it incredible that no one from the planned Auckland Festival had talked to them. "We'd have been delighted to co-operate, but no one asked us."

Uwe Grodd, the Auckland-based Naxos festival's artistic director, said yesterday he was still waiting for a call. He says he spent 2 1/2 years talking to various people involved in the embryonic Auckland Festival organisation offering "artists, quartets, ensembles, programmes, ideas, and budgets but they would just not pick up on it".

It seems amazing that such a musical goldmine was so ignored. Particularly when the festival organisers obviously had no alternative musical plans.

But let's not get bogged down in historical recriminations. The thing to concentrate on is that the Naxos lode of artistic gold is still available, as is, presumably, a generous sponsorship package.

Auckland has just 14 months left to match the tried-and-true recipe Wellington organisers used in that festival's heyday.

With the Naxos connection, there's a chance to build a festival-class music programme within both the time and, I suspect, tight budget available. If festival organisers have lost Dr Grodd and Mr Heymann's phone numbers, I can supply them.