What could be the matter with the Rotterdam Philharmonic Gergiev Festival - the official name to emphasise its international appeal anyway? As soon as you enter de Doelen concert hall, you immediately get the feeling that you have arrived at an ordinary, weekday concert, even though Valeri Gergiev is on the bill. No decoration of the large rooms and nothing on and around the stage that even comes close to a festival decoration, not even a flower arrangement on the stage could come off.
Would the Rotterdam Philharmonic Orchestra, which runs the festival together with a more specific festival organisation, have thrown in the towel after the negative advice of the Rotterdam Council for Arts and Culture, RRKC? After all, that advice states that they should start sharing the subsidy with the Rotterdam Operadagen every other year. Subsidy, that has been the crux with many an orchestra and festival - actually for the entire performing arts - over the past two years. Everyone talked about it at one point, the government was blamed for everything, but there was also no denying that there is a long-term economic crisis. But then such a sparse dressing up of the 16th edition of an imaginative festival, that's weird.
How does it actually work, such a four-yearly grant application? Beforehand, the minister, state secretary or councillor with culture in the portfolio provides a series of principles on the basis of which the government makes clear how the institution to be subsidised can get its money. And this is indeed where some things go thoroughly wrong. In these memoranda, the government shows that it only goes with the flow of the day. Sometimes education is a spearhead, other times market forces and last time the much-discussed cultural entrepreneurship. At the RPhO and the Gergjev Festival, this has led to sizeable - and therefore expensive - education and marketing departments. What used to be accounting and human resources is now suddenly called Finance & Human Recources and the orchestra itself is now Rotterdam Philharmonic.
But all this pseudo-English cannot disguise the fact that the Gergyev Festival's main programme looks like nothing. Programmatic failure. And it shows: the hall is no more than about eighty per cent full. That has never happened before. In terms of marketing and entrepreneurship not a best result.
The audience is simply no longer warm to Valeri Gergyev alone. He needs to do something meaningful too. Rachmaninov's symphonic poem Death Island, Sergei Prokofiev's fifth symphony, although played soundly at the opening concert, were also performed at previous editions. Rodion Shchedrin's 4th piano concerto - himself present - was especially of great value due to Olli Mustonen's wonderful dripping, ringing and ringing performance. Why not have an entire festival dedicated to this kind of music instead of middle-of-the-road Music for the Millions?
And a day later, Verdi's Otello in concert form by the Mariinsky Theatre's full company - always a bit of a flesh-and-fish experience at opera - but going forward , it's been going on for years. How on earth this can be reconciled with the theme The Sea, spread over three festivals in a row, is impossible to explain. While opera is supposed to be the focus of the Gergiev Festival, it was now dragged in by the hair. Not badly performed, but the compellingness was lacking. Afterwards, the auditorium was not completely demolished as it always was in the past.
Furthermore, on Thursday evening, Yannick Nézet-Séguin may conduct Dvorak's ninth symphony 'Aus der neuen Welt' and Copland's clarinet concerto. The sea? Where then? Well ahead: at Dvorak's then. By steamer across the great herring pond. Only on the final evening on Saturday does the sea come full circle: Debussy, La Mèr; Sibelius, Die Okeaniden; Ernest Chausson's Poème de l' Amour et de la Mèr. But whether this is a festival programme that captures the imagination? You can follow government idiocy so blindly, but if you are not alert to the content and only play Sunday afternoon music, it will stop at some point. And that's what the Gergyev Festival seems to be doing here: stopping.
Rotterdam Philharmonic Gergiev Festival, 7 to 15 September, Rotterdam, de Doelen and other venues. www.gergievfestival.nl. Attended: Friday 7 and Sunday 8 September
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