[167.1] BERKELEY NOT SQUARE

Composer Michael Berkeley on festivals:

"Given a clean slate and an impressive budget, I would love to programme a festival that might take something from Coldplay and Radiohead to the London Sinfonietta or Mitsuko Uchida via Andy Sheppard and Django Bates: in other words, a festival that exposed audiences to completely new forms of music-making at their best and most diverse.

"A festival should leave a community feeling enriched, both economically and in the mind, and should provide a high-octane level of intellectual energy that suffuses the lives and work of the people living there. Let's not worry about frightening the Aldeburgh mackerel or giving strange new signals to the brains at GCHQ in Cheltenham. No more Mostly Mozart, Basically Beethoven or even Hugely Handel: let's go for the jugular."