Symphony For The Absent

How many of you can say you've had a symphony named after you? Very few, I'd wager. To be eponymous in a symphonic way is a fair old honour, rather like having one's appellation attached to a newly discovered sexually transmitted disease or a boson. New symphonies are, I guess, rather less common than bosons (and presumably, there are enough bosons floating around for everyone on the planet to have millions named after them and not just Professor Higgs), but like models of car, symphonies tend to be given numbers rather than names: the 323i Overture, or some such.

Norman Foster, Baron Foster of Thames Bank, is quite a famous chap. There again, so is David Beckham. Unlike Becks though, Norman has given his name to a symphony (or maybe there is a Beckham Symphony, just that I've never heard of it). Not the Norman Symphony but the Foster's Symphony, and it was unveiled, if one can say that a symphony can be unveiled, on the opening night of the Pollensa Festival.

This is all fair enough, and as Norman Foster is well regarded enough in Spanish circles to have been awarded the Prince of Asturias Award, for a Spanish (Mallorcan) composer to have fostered a symphony also seems fair enough. Despite the prestigiousness, it would appear that it was all rather lost on senior politicians in Mallorca. Perhaps they mistook the name of the symphony for a sponsorship deal, though given that the regional government touts for private-sector support from wherever it can, you would have thought that all the political glitterati would have been flocking to Pollensa. Maybe this was why none of them turned up; when they realised it wasn't a symphony in the name of an Australian lager but some builder chap, they realised they had other engagements.

It is pretty poor form, though, that the regional government couldn't send at least one emissary to greet the world-famous architect. So thin on the ground were the politicos that Lord Foster had to make do with Pollensa's mayor and his number two, the lovely Malena. The absence of the island's rulers has not gone unnoticed, and criticism has been forthcoming, as also has criticism for the fact that music critics were shunted into a part of the Sant Domingo cloister where they couldn't see very well.

I could have been one of these music critics in that I could have taken advantage of an open freebie invitation to pitch up at any of the festival's events, but as I am not a music critic (not of the classical genre, at any rate), then this would have been a case of taking freeloading a bit too far. It's just as well. My review would probably have been along the more-enjoyment-from-watching-paint-dry variety line, but then I am a Philistine. What little I have been able to see and hear of the grand occasion is rather illuminating, however. Not the music, but all the empty seats in the front rows. Perhaps they had been reserved for members of the Balearic Government.

The criticism of the non-attendance is valid. Disrespect might be stretching it, but Norman Foster is an important figure, important enough for him to have received the honour from Crown-Prince Felipe. Perhaps the politicos are reserving a trip to the festival if Queen Sofia attends, which she often does, but it wasn't only Lord Foster who was being neglected, it was the composer and the artistic director of the festival, Joan Valent, and Lord Foster's wife, Elena Ochoa, who is a pretty serious name in her own right. Her involvement in the arts, which extends to a gallery in Madrid and to her having founded the Ivory Press and launched the highly regarded "C International Photo Magazine", made her as significant an attendee as her husband, given the broader arts basis of this year's festival.

There was some bad blood between the town hall and the government following last year's funding debacle for the festival, but it had seemed as though things had moved on, and moved on in the right direction with the government's involvement shifting from the tourism ministry to the culture ministry, and the government had been represented at the festival's press launch. It is a bit of a mystery, therefore, why no member of the government was there to greet Lord Foster.

It should have been an occasion on which to at least show some official support for the festival, but no, the government blew it. When Valent composes further symphonies, it is unlikely he will name any after Balearics politicians.


Any comments to andrew@thealcudiaguide.com please.