With more free resources and fewer paid-programmes, we're opening up behind-the-scenes knowledge to every audience member

Where Have All the Programmes Gone?

Before 2024, we produced printed programmes for the majority of events in the Festival. However, last year you may have noticed they started to disappear. Why?  Naturally, there were financial and environmental factors to consider. Producing the full range was hugely resource-intensive and increasingly wasteful, especially as demand continued to decline year on year. 

We believe that making each experience as rich and meaningful as possible means providing you with all the information you need to fully appreciate a performance; whether that's the concert repertoire, an opera synopsis, or an interview with the play’s director.

Charging for this essential content within printed programmes meant it was only available to a small minority of the audience.  

Reflections On The 2024 International Festival

In 2024 we started trialling ways of democratising this information. This was to ensure ‘the broadest possible audience’ had an opportunity to gain greater insight from our curatorial team, expert commentators, or the artists themselves. As well as accessing the practical information about what they were watching or listening to of course.

What We Did

• Introduced keepsake freesheets with essential and some interpretive information for all staged works and Usher Hall and Queens Hall concerts. 

• Refined and increased our audio introductions, The Warm Up, sent to ticket buyers before selected performances featuring interviews with artists. 

• Piloted the use of surtitle screens in the Usher Hall and the Queens Hall to display composer, piece and movement titles, as well as translated song text so people could follow the concert without having to look down at printed material, or digital devices.  

• Continued to provide in-concert introductions and initiatives such as Inside Out as well as pre and post-event conversations. 

All of these interventions were provided free of charge to ticket-buyers with a much smaller selection of souvenir programmes additionally available at a cost.  

What's New This Year?

Following the 2024 Festival, we undertook extensive research including surveys with thousands of respondents and focus groups to understand how audiences felt about the new range of materials available to them. In response to this feedback, we have further refined the offer for our 2025 Festival.

Dive Deeper at The 2025 International Festival

• More insight in our keepsake freesheets.

• Surtitles providing repertoire information displayed at all Usher Hall and Queens Hall concerts.

• The Warm-Up, our audio introductions to Festival performances, available from July.

• Expanded online resources including specially commissioned editorial content.

Discover online essays, freesheet information, The Warm Up, Playlists, Photo Galleries and more on the Dive Deeper tab of each event page.

Our research and sales analysis clearly show that large-scale staged opera is the exception when it comes to the demand for souvenir printed programmes, so these will continue to be available and can be pre-ordered alongside your ticket or purchased in the venue. 

We’re not only providing more resources free to all audience members, we’re also reducing the amount of paper used in these initiatives, forecasting 35% fewer pages printed and 45% less wastage in 2025 compared to 2024, which already resulted in a significant reduction on previous years.  

We value your feedback so be sure to tell us what you think in our post-Festival audience survey or by emailing [email protected]