London 2012 Festival will be largest cultural celebration in our lifetime

The full programme for the London 2012 Festival was launched today (26 April). It contains some 12,000 events and performances from over 25,000 artists from all 205 participating Olympic nations.

Kicking off across the UK on 21 June and running until 9 September, there will be 137 world firsts and 85 UK premiers, featuring well-known names from the arts, music, comedy, dance and culture. 

Billed as the ‘Once in a Lifetime’ Festival and taking place at 900 venues, the London 2012 Festival  begins with four opening day events. 

Lake Windermere in the Lake District will stage a free outdoor event featuring French pyrotechnic wizards Les Commandos Percu to celebrate the Olympic Flame’s arrival to the region, whilst in the heart of Derry/Londonderry’s new cultural quarter, a Peace One Day Global Truce Countdown Concert will take place. 

Also, on 21 June, the children of Raploch in Stirling will perform in The Big Concert, conducted by world renowned conductor Gustavo Dudamel, and Edward Gardner and Simon Halsey will raise their batons together for the UK premier of Weltethos at the Symphony Hall, Birmingham. 

London highlights during the Festival will include the floating children’s opera The Owl and the Pussycat written by Monty Python star Terry Jones and Oscar winning composer Anne Dudley, which will travel through London’s canal network, plus pop-up Shakespeare performances around the city, with a cast led by actor and director Mark Rylance. 

A barge manned by a group of well-known British comedians will set sail from London and attempt to reach Edinburgh’s celebrated Fringe venue, The Pleasance, staging pop-up comedy gigs along the way. Whilst, The BT River of Music will showcase performances from five continents across six stages located in iconic locations around the capital. The six stages will represent the continents - Asia in Battersea Park, Africa in Jubilee Gardens, Europe in Trafalgar Square and Somerset House, the Americas at the Tower of London, and Oceania in the Greenwich Old Royal Naval College. 

Some 160,000 free tickets are available for confirmed acts including the Noisettes and the Scissor Sisters. 

Major London events which form part of the Festival include BBC Radio 1’s Hackney Weekend (23-24 June), the BBC Proms at the Royal Albert Hall, the World Shakespeare Festival and Urban Classic - a mash-up between the BBC Symphony Orchestra and urban acts including Ms Dynamite planned for Waltham Forest Town Hall on 5 July. 

Other much anticipated activity from across the country includes the world premiere of Karlheinz Stockhausen’s Mittwoch aus Licht, which features a string quartet streamed live from helicopters flying over Birmingham, plus an ‘Unlimited’ programme of events involving deaf and disabled artists. 

Ruth MacKenzie, Director of the Cultural Olympiad and London 2012 Festival said: “It will be the largest cultural celebration in our lifetime. With new work from the best musicians, comics, artists, film makers and more, there will be arts events taking place in unusual places all over the UK that will showcase the best in international culture when the eyes of the world are on us this summer.”

Principal funders of the London 2012 Festival are Arts Council England, Legacy Trust UK and the Olympic Lottery Distributor. BP and BT are Premier Partners. 

London invests in the arts. But is it the quantity or the quality that's important?

Taking advantage of the Nordic Bar's any bottle of wine for £10 on a Monday night offer, the talk turned to the merits of the 2012 Olympic Games. A friend of mine expressed his concern that the capital's arts provision would suffer at the hands of sport. I took delight in reporting the next day that Ken Livingstone had announced a £1.4 million fund for organisations to develop new cultural projects across the capital.

The fund has been established by the London Development Agency and will be delivered by the Arts Council England. According to the publicity boys at City Hall, this is just the beginning. More funding will be made available to support cultural projects in the run up to 2012. By blogging this, lets see if that promise is fulfilled over the coming years.

The fund was announced at the same time as a cultural audit that compares London's cultural environment with four other major world cities. Amongst the findings, the audit states that London has 184 museums compared with 157 in Paris or 91 in New York. And 55 major theatres compared with 39 in New York and 19 in Shanghai. New York has more major concert halls than London (12 and 9 respectively), but London stages more music performances each year than New York (32,292 against 22,204). London stages 200 festivals each year and has 400 venues offering music.

The audit has been rubbished by one of Ken Livingstone's most outspoken opponents, journalist Andrew Gilligan in today's Evening Standard. In amongst the rhetoric and accusations of suspect number crunching, Gilligan makes a valid point. It should be the quality of London's attractions and not the quantity that makes this city a world beater. For a copy of the audit, download it here and make your own mind up.