Tale of two cities

Eternal though they may seem, the Proms and the Edinburgh Festival are susceptible to change. Roger Wright will take over the former next year and Jonathan Mills has just assumed responsibility for the latter. New appointments do not necessarily mean that anything more up-to-date will happen, nor that the change will be for the better — the Bath Festival seems to have been all but destroyed by a recent and tactless overdose of innovation; but the signs from the two capitals are encouraging.

The Edinburgh Festival has traditionally been hostile to what is still called ‘early music’, the received wisdom being that the people of Scotland would not come to hear it. Quite why it was assumed that they would come instead to watch experimental dance projects (or if they didn’t it didn’t matter) has never been explained, but over the past weeks Mills has been presiding over full house after full house for his brand-new early music series.