What exactly is “music festival“? its definition is ambiguous. Our site “Around the Music Festival“ considers lasting only one-day performance stages as a single “event” and it is not counted as a music festival; however, there are music festivals with varieties of time period from 2 days, the shortest case, to nearly 2 months.
Let’s look at the example of “La Forre Journee = enthusiasm day“, a music festival established in Japan. This annual music festival was held in Tokyo from May 4th to 6th in 2017 during the national holiday seasons „Golden Week“, packed numerous short program concerts and gathered more than 420000 audiences. 3 days are rather shortest period for a music festival, but it it enjoys the biggest number of guests in the country, which is the good sample to ensure that music festal is not determined merely by the length of the session.
In the sense of being presence, we should not forget about a music meeting only for one day with enormous existence more than a music festival because of its periodical performance. The representative on this category will be New Year’s concert by the Vienna Philharmonic Orchestra. Musical new year’s card from the city of music. Its performance is relayed around the world and 600 million people are supposed to watch it. Of course, getting a „platinum ticket“ is a very difficult business (the original tickets themselves are extremely expensive, so the music appreciation package tour would cost fortune!), and it appears to be on the top ranking of „the concert I’d like to visit at most“.
Meanwhile, the same „1-day event“ can certainly have the form of music festival as well. A full concert of Beethoven’s all symphonies is now New Year’s eve tradition in Tokyo. Overnight concerts with all nine symphonies were carried out several times in the past somewhere in the world; however, it’s only in Tokyo where you can go and see every year! What an astonishing existence. Established by the lord of the conductor Hiroyuki Iwaki and composer Nariaki Saegusa, this even reveals its festival character in the sense of deepening Beethoven’s music.
Introducing music festivals, we face a problem how to deal with the music festivals that no one can buy a ticket. Good example is the „Bayreuth Festival“ in Germany. That is the music festival held every summer at the special theater, the composer Wagner built (to be exact, built by Ludwig II of Bavaria) to make his own masterpiece.
If it’s about the New Year’s concert in Vienna, you might have a chance to enter through unbelievably expensive arrangement tour, but „Bayreuth Festival“ is another story. This is exclusively temple for Wagner’s music fans called „Wagnerian“. Music festival ticket with a name on must be seen only there. They are not allowed to sell their own tickets to somebody else, ticket scalpers have to give up. I feel rather terrible to convey the charm of the music festival that readers can not even visit.
