A FESTIVAL HISTORY by Catherine Beale

The twenty-first Presteigne Festival of Music and the Arts marked the survival to maturity of this unique event. It was also, like most 21st celebrations, an opportunity to recall past achievements and to cast a speculative glance at the future.

The first Festival was held from 18th-25th September 1983, after local composer Adrian Williams and musicians Gareth and Lynden Rees-Roberts decided to bring first class musical performance to the Welsh border. Presteigne became their focus after Adrian recognised the extraordinary acoustic qualities of St Andrew's church. To finance the week-long festival (the only public funding was a £500 guarantee against loss from the South East Wales Arts Association) various fund-raising events were staged. They included a play by Theatr Powys, an organ recital, a midsummer ceilidh at Kinsham, Viennese waltzing at the Memorial Hall, summertime jazz in Knighton and an end of year disco for local pupils. Most bizarre of all was a sponsored performance in July of Erik Satie's Vexations - four lines of music repeated 840 times non-stop from 7am until midnight. The performers, Adrian Vernon Fish and Dawn Pye (the Fish Pye duo) donned Victorian costume and played in Archie Dobson's High Street barber's shop. With every ten repetitions a hand bell was rung outside on the pavement. This eccentric marathon captured the imagination of the local, then national and international press, who descended on Presteigne, resulting in coverage on BBC's Nationwide, in France, via South Africa to Sydney. The Presteigne Festival was on the map!

The organisers of these Festival-funding events formed the Mid-Border Community Arts Association (MBCAA). The 1983 Festival set a pattern that was followed for the next six years. On the first night, an Art Show was opened at the Shire Hall for the duration of the Festival (receiving 800 visitors in 1985, including Lord Gowrie, then Minister for the Arts). A Festival Eucharist was established on the Sunday, and the concerts (some of which were recorded from the very first year by BBC Radio 3) were interspersed with other arts events, including poetry readings and talks by writers. Current movie releases were shown by the Film Society, and theatrical shows staged by the Presteigne Players, producing memorable performances such as that by Garry Banks as Count Flatula in Presteigne's Revenge, 1983.

From 1984 Adrian put the Festival in the hands of the MBCAA committee, chaired from 1985 by the late Morris Dodderidge. This left Adrian free to concentrate on composition. In 1985 he was commissioned by the Three Choirs Festival, and won the prestigious Guiness Prize. In 1989 Adrian reclaimed the reins of Presteigne Festival and made two significant changes. The Festival was separated from the other arts events. The MBCAA, today abbreviated to Mid Border Arts (MBA), continues to stage these, making Presteigne, year-round, a vibrant centre for the arts.

Adrian's other significant change in 1989 was his appointment of George Vass as director of the Festival Orchestra. The conductor William Boughton, founder of the English String Orchestra in 1980, first brought a string orchestra to the Festival in 1985. It was made up of young people from Shropshire, Herefordshire and Radnorshire who came together to rehearse for two days before giving a concert at the Festival that year. They were lodged with local families, a custom that persists today. George, being based in London, had the necessary contacts to bring together young professional musicians to play at the Festival. For some of them, the Presteigne Festival has remained a fixture in their diaries ever since.

The next three years were a progression towards the tenth Presteigne Festival, the 'open borders' festival of 1992. That year, twelve composers, one from each of the (then) EC countries wrote new works as part of the European Arts Festival. That festival, Adrian's last, was a great popular success, the roof of the Leisure Centre nearly lifting off when Zulu group Shikisha performed. Also performing that year was percussionist Evelyn Glennie. Other leading musicians brought to Presteigne in the first decade included Alexander Baillie, Brian Rayner Cook, Osian Ellis, Julian Lloyd-Webber and Anthony Goldstone.

While Adrian as the first Artistic Director established the Festival, it is to George Vass, his successor, that the Festival owes its survival. Besides sustaining the level of excellence, George has courageously put the promotion of living composers at the core of Presteigne's identity. He has maintained the Festival's reputation for the encouragement of outstanding young performers, while personally being one of the key reasons that the Presteigne Festival is characterised by informality and friendliness. He has furthermore successfully negotiated the difficult terrain between developing the Festival and heeding the grumblings of the auditor. This is a rare combination of talents to add to his evident musical skills. It was a fitting tribute to George's contribution that in 1999 the Festival was nominated for a Royal Philharmonic Society Award for the excellence of its programming. Paul Conway writing in The Independent in 2001 identified Presteigne as occupying 'the musical mid-ground between the Three Choirs' nostalgia and Huddersfield's avant-garde'.

In recent years Anne Queffélec, Alice Neary, Gretel Dowdeswell, Sarah Jane Bradley, Stephen De Pledge, Anthony Marwood, Chenyin Li and the Sorrel String Quartet have performed here. The Festival commissions new works annually - 28 since George became Director - and since the mid 1990s the Composer in Residence feature has brought top living composers to the town. These have included John Joubert, David Matthews, Hilary Tann, Michael Berkeley, Rhian Samuel, John McCabe, Paul Patterson and Nicholas Maw.

A unique atmosphere is conjured up at Presteigne; composers have an opportunity to mix with one another and to work with the musicians; local hosts support their guests by attending their performances; and many unseen voluntary contributions are made by local people, from forgoing parking spaces to lending manpower to move equipment or steward events. As one critic said last year, 'it feels like Aldeburgh must have felt in the very early days when things were very small scale and very modest but you had people of distinction just rolling around the streets and open for people to come up and say "I really liked your piano trio last night. Wasn't that fantastic?" And everybody gathers in the pub ... there's no barrier really - everybody feels that they're in this together.' (Michael White interviewed on BBC Radio 3, - 26th August 2002)

Presteigne Festival has been fortunate indeed in some of the support that it has received, particularly from Michael Berkeley, the Festival's President, from the late Lord Croft and Morris Dodderidge. Most of all, however, the Directors gratefully acknowledge the support of the local community, without which it could not stage the Festival. They are keen to acknowledge this actively, and have, as a result, introduced an annual workshop at which professional musicians from the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra go into local schools to give many primary and secondary pupils their first experience of classical instruments and music. The Board would like to expand this work by taking music into some of the residential homes - for young people and old - that are in the area, but it has not been possible, as yet, to secure funding for this.

At the first Festival in 1983, Gerald Finzi's Let us Garlands Bring was sung by the leading baritone Brian Rayner Cook. It was fitting, therefore, that the twenty-first anniversary should be celebrated with the commission of A Garland for Presteigne to which ten composers featured over the years have contributed. The 'magic' of the Presteigne Festival is cherished and will be fostered in the future. George Vass and his fellow Directors intend that the Presteigne Festival should continue to nurture talented performers at the start of their careers, whilst introducing audiences to the joys of contemporary music in the friendly atmosphere and beautiful surroundings of the Border Marches. These are modest aims, perhaps, but a coming of age should be accompanied by growing wisdom. The Presteigne Festival is mature enough to acknowledge its limitations, but has lost none of its youthful uncompromising passion for excellence.

Copyright © 2003, Catherine Beale. First published in the Presteigne Festival Souvenir Programme 2003