Lucerne's KKL concert hall ... an impressive venue for an impressive programme. Photograph: B Higgs
Funding. Not always a subject to get the juices flowing, with the eternal cries from the British arts that they need more money, and the ever-present riposte from the DCMS and the Arts Council that we've never had it so good. So just to throw a spanner into the works, from the Swiss end of the spectrum: the Lucerne Festival is 97 per cent privately funded, and yet manages to have one of the most adventurous programmes of any international festival. To put that into perspective, most major British institutions receive about a third of their annual budget from our Arts Councils.
It's a tribute to the General Manager in Lucerne, Michael Haefliger, who formed close partnerships with Claudio Abbado and Pierre Boulez, setting up Abbado's bespoke orchestra in 2003, and in the same year, the Lucerne Festival Academy, in which over a hundred young players, composers, and conductors learn 20th- and 21st-century repertoire first-hand from the maître lui-même. Haefliger has made new music part of Lucerne's remit ever since he took over in 1999, transforming what was basically a conservative orchestra festival into one of the most innovative stops on the international musical calendar.
I'm not saying that we should try and emulate Lucerne's funding model - clearly, there is far greater willingness from big business in Switzerland than there is in Britain to support the arts, and there is also more money floating around the lake here in Lucerne than in any town of a comparable size in the UK. Just 60 000 people live in Lucerne, yet the town managed to fund the £112 million it cost to build the Jean Nouvel-designed concert hall, the KKL; what's more, the festival is building a new hall for contemporary music theatre and chamber music, also with private money, scheduled to open in 2013. And tickets here, for the most glamorous visiting orchestras, are eye-wateringly expensive: the same orchestras and programmes you can hear at the Proms for a fiver will cost you here between £15 and £150, with most tickets at the top end of the spectrum. Cheap it ain't.
But there's a reason for that: they need to make back as much of the annual £12 million budget through the box office as they can, since there's no subsidy to take the slack. Effectively, Haefliger uses the money generated by the Vienna Philharmonic or the New York Philharmonic to fund the new music programme, with tickets for concerts, many with Boulez or, say, George Benjamin conducting, sold for a fraction of what a visiting orchestra costs, along with free workshops and masterclasses.
The lesson from Lucerne is that even in a situation which ought to breed artistic atrophy - being completely reliant on sponsorship from business and the whims of the well-heeled euro-music-lovers who make up much of the audience here - it's possible to have a progressive artistic vision. As ever, the maxim seems to be: the bolder you are in your programmes and your ideas, the more interest, audience, and money you're going to attract. That's a lesson that many British festivals, opera houses, orchestras, and funders need to take to heart, with their luxurious (at least from a Lucerne point of view!) combination of public and private money.
