Strike action by actors over performers' unemployment benefits have caused the last minute cancellation of the famed annual Avignon Arts Festival due to open Monday. The neighboring Aix-en-Provence Opera Festival has also been cancelled after demonstrators brought a performance to a halt by throwing fire crackers onto the stage.
The French government appears unwilling to back down over its intention to cut benefits and a question mark now hangs over the fate of artistic events both in Paris and across the country during the rest of the summer.
1 July, 03
It's that music festival time again in Europe. The music comes to suit all tastes from Opera to Popera. It can be heard in a variety of venues from a cramped Wagnerian theatre to mediaeval hilltop cities and romantic Alpine lakesides, from the streets of Berlin to Greek waterside tavernas.
Take your jazzpick this year at the North Sea Jazz Festival in The Hague, Netherlands, or at the equally prestigious Umbria Jazz Festival in Italy's picturesque mediaeval Umbrian hilltop town of Perugia.
Join a million other revellers and 250 DJs in the streets of Berlin for the annual free and totally chaotic Loved-up Dance Parade and be prepared to display more than normally meets the eye in even this hedonistic city.
Classical music and opera buffs are, as always, well served at annual festivals in Austria's beautiful Salzburg; Lucerne, Switzerland's languid lakeside resort and the annual Wagner fest in Bavarian Bayreuth. If Wagner is too indigestible a fare for your musical taste, join me under the stars in Verona's awe-inspiring Roman amphitheatre to watch Carmen, Turandot and Aida on three successive nights of grand opera in spectacular setting. Take your fill of this ancient Roman and mediaeval city where Romeo died for his Juliet before driving over the Alpine Brenner Pass into Austria to catch a performance of West Side Story, Leonard Bernstein's reworking of Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet, on the famous floating stage at the Bregenz Festival on the shores of Lake Constance.
And of course if your name is Jones or Llewelyn you will probably be making your annual musical pilgimage to hear the pure tones of the massed voices from the Valleys in lusty choral harmony at the annual Welsh Eisteddford at Llangollen.
Llangollen has much more to offer the visitor than musical harmony on a July evening. Spanning the River Dee, the town has a history stretching back to the 7th Century when fiery Saint Collen, a Preacherman of the ancient Celtic Church, arrived in the valley and built himself a cell here. Six centuries later in 1201, Madog ap Gruffudd, Prince of Powys, founded a Cistercian abbey nearby. Like the nearby castle Dinas Bran overlooking Llangollen valley, it stands now in ruins. But it is a magnificent example of Britain's heritage of gothic architecture and should be seen.
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