Think Alan Ayckbourn on acid: a commonplace (well, almost) set-up, exaggerated further and further beyond what we’d ever anticipate.
The big yellow banners proclaiming "Welcome, world" are out. And judging by the seething, heaving crowds, a fair portion of the world has indeed descended on Edinburgh, where the annual August festivals season has now been up and running for just shy of a week.
Idyllic setting, star-rated musicians, the sense of an occasion. Verbier so wholly fulfils the clichés of an international music festival that to the cynical it can seem complacent or arrogant in doing so. To the uninitiated – and this was my first visit to the Monaco of the Mountains – there is more than a sprinkling of magic about the sheer implausibility of the place.
“Ooooh, it’s gorgeous!” exclaimed my wife-to-be as we arrived at what had been described as “an oasis in Hertfordshire.” They weren’t kidding, either. The site for the inaugural festival organised by Notting Hill Carnival stalwarts Sancho Panza couldn’t have been more different from West London if it tried. In place of terraced houses there were wall-to-wall trees, the only flyover was the sound of planes headed for Luton across an open sky.
For anyone who suffers from FIFOMO (festival-induced-fear-of-missing-out), Standon Calling is ideal. It’s like a pocket-sized version of Latitude, borrowing the Big Top and the mix of modern music with nostalgic pop acts, or Wilderness, borrowing the purple domed stage, the need for hot tubs and gastronimical treats. It has the feel of an epic house party, being set in the grounds of a 16th-century manor house 30 miles north of London.
Camp Bestival, curated by DJ Rob da Bank, has taken place at Lulworth Castle in Dorset since 2008. It’s now an institution of sorts, rammed to the gills with ageing ravers pulling around colourfully decorated trollies and paying over the odds for “reimagined Eritrean street food” and the like. It is, as I’ve written many times before, the Waitrose of festivals but that’s no bad thing. An easy-to-ridicule, surface middle-classness masks a haven where parents and children can enjoy the wild, colourful, surrealist carnival of festival-land together, as well as a plethora of good music.
Nestling amid the area in the woods where they have the gong baths and the kora-makers and back massages was an art installation by Graeme Miller - basically, you lay back on a trolley while an intern/elf pushed you through the woods while you ponder the underside of leaves and the sky. WOMAD does give you a different perspective anyway - a welcome respite from post-Brexit, pre-Trump xenophobia - and as a live celebration of global musical treasures it remains unmatched.
Where would you go to hear the most electrifying and collegial orchestral playing in the world? It used to be Lucerne while Claudio Abbado was alive. Now that the Lucerne Festival Orchestra has become like any classy superband, the answer is Pärnu in the south of Estonia.
The Montréal International Jazz Festival's 37th edition presented its accustomed surfeit of gigs, covering the complete range from concert hall spectaculars to small club sessions. A large part of this, the globe's biggest jazzfest, is the massive-scale freebie shows on various outdoor stages. The festival completely takes over Montréal's downtown centre, which just happens to be this French-speaking city’s cultural area.
Familiar words pepper the lead item on the 9am radio news: "Brexit", "Theresa May", "Boris Johnson". Yet the bulletin is delivered in the first language of the 49,000-population Faroe Islands. The self-governing region of Denmark may be a remote cluster of 18 North Atlantic islands, but the Britain-watching contagion has spread to a place which has never been a member of the EU. Denmark is. The Faroes aren't.