Move over, Edinburgh

Abu Dhabi wants its arts festival to be the envy of the world. But can money alone create culture in the desert, asks Stuart Jeffries

Just before we enter the air-conditioned auditorium of the Emirates Palace in Abu Dhabi for a gala concert featuring three of the world's greatest opera singers, we are each handed a copy of Chopard's Happy News magazine. As the movers and sheikhs of the United Arab Emirates take their seats, I read its interview with Russian soprano Anna Netrebko. The interviewer poses questions that Paxman and Humphrys would never dare: "You are now an ambassadress for Chopard. How would you define glamour?" "Chopard jewellery really epitomises glamour," replies Netrebko, diplomatically. It's going to be a long evening.

But Netrebko is an ambassador for more than jewellery. On stage, the Bolshoi Theatre Orchestra's conductor Vladimir Vedernikov is summoning his musicians to perform the lilting introduction to Soave Sia il Vento, the lovely trio from Mozart's Così Fan Tutti (they used it in a Mercedes ads). It is sung thrillingly by the pregnant soprano, performing with her Uruguayan fiance Erwin Schrott and the Latvian mezzo Elina Garanc...#711;a. All are here during the fifth Abu Dhabi music and arts festival to showcase western classical music.

The audience, though, knows enough already to realise that western classical music of this ilk is - like the Ferrari and Bentley dealerships that line the route from the airport, or the jewellery Netrebko endorses - a byword for luxury, and Abu Dhabi wants a piece of it. The emirate wants to spend its vast wealth on more than palaces, limos and rocks. It wants be known as a destination that is not just wildly rich but culturally sophisticated, and so is investing in western high art in possibly one of the boldest, certainly most expensive, cultural revolutions the world has ever seen, and one that begs profound questions. Is culture a commodity that can be imported and exported? Will the world's best artists bend their knees when Abu Dhabi's sheikhs loosen their purse strings?

Abu Dhabi certainly has the money to import some of the glitziest names in the cultural world to help make this revolution happen. Abu Dhabi earns an estimated $25m (£13m) a day from oil, and has between 40 and 100 years of oil left. And with these bottomless pockets, it is buying culture. Four of the world's top architects are designing a quartet of great museums that even now are rising on Saadiyat Island, a few miles off the coast. There will be a branch of the Louvre, designed by Pritzker-winning architect Jean Nouvel, a Guggenheim Museum by Frank Gehry, and a Maritime Museum by Japan's Tadao Ando. But most pertinently, there will be, perhaps even before London has had its Olympics, a Performing Arts Centre designed by British-Iraqi architect Zaha Hadid, which will have five theatres, a music hall, opera house, and other halls with a combined seating capacity of 6,300.

Nor is Abu Dhabi putting just the world's top architects to work for its cultural revolution. It is also buying up some of the world's leading singers and musicians. Last year, José Carreras sang in this hall. This year, not only is there tonight's gala performance, but violinist Sarah Chang plays Vivaldi's Four Seasons, while pianist Jean-Yves Thibaudet and violinist Nikolaj Znaider perform two concerts with the London Phil. Next year, an even larger roster of classical talent is likely to be summoned to this palace in the desert. But the festival does have its intriguing oddities: when, for instance, the Bolshoi performed here last week, the crown prince's wife was in the audience. Did she like the show? We will never know: she was behind a screen, hidden from the importunate eyes of mortals other than her husband.

Tonight's concert consists of operatic lollipops plucked from their dramatic contexts (Casta Diva from Bellini's Norma, the obligatory Toreador from Bizet's Carmen, cherry-picked Mozart arias); an unremitting showcase of the world's greatest talents and operatic highlights. For me, although the performances are exquisite displays of vocal virtuosity, the evening is akin to arriving at a desert oasis to find that to survive you'll have to be forcefed airlifted cases of Cristal.

This year's festival is being executive produced for the first time by global entertainment agency IMG Artists, a company expert in setting the jewels of classical music in crowns of lucrative well-being. IMG runs so-called Sun festivals in California's Napa valley and Cortona in Tuscany, offering the discerning wealthy experiences of great music, art, food and wine. Many of the artists performing here (including Netrebko) have also performed at these events. Abu Dhabi's festival, however, is more interesting than those of California and Tuscany, because it is at a cultural crossroads. Sheikh Nahayan bin Mubarak al-Nahyan, the UAE's minister of higher education and scientific research, who is also the festival's president and patron, says in the programme: "We celebrate the increasing community interest and involvement in this annual cultural event." And yet tonight, the auditorium is only three-fifths full. In London, Milan or New York, this concert would have been sold out months in advance. Tickets are hilariously cheap (mine cost 200 dhirams - roughly £27.50). When Justin Timberlake and Elton John recently played here, thousands came. Getting them to come to western classical music is proving more problematic.

But why does Abu Dhabi need western classical music? One sceptical suggestion is that the region's tourism had hit a ceiling. Many came for the sun and sand, but realised that there was little else to do and haven't returned. In a way parallel to Singapore, another city that got rich quick and realised it needed to acquire culture to keep visitors coming, Abu Dhabi is using classical music as the handmaiden of the tourist industry.

So why bother? "They want something to be here when the oil money runs out," says Barrett Wissman, chairman of IMG Artists. "They have a commitment to cultural development. My great hope is that they will establish a training orchestra of local musicians who can seed a local culture of classical music." Already there is an education programme as part of the festival, aimed at cultivating people's tastes and local musicians' skills.

After the standing ovations for Netrebko, Schrott and Garanc...#711;a are over, I put these questions to Hoda al-Khamis Kanoo, the festival's founder. She argues that the festival and the cultural programme in the UAE has nobler aspirations than consolidating tourist revenues. "It is about building a bridge of culture between the east and west," she says. Indeed, the festival consists of more than western music uprooted and planted in the desert. I hear the great Iraqi oud player Naseer Shamma rehearse his Oriental Orchestra for its world premiere of a piece called The Soul of the Orient. I see two fine exhibitions in the Emirates palace: Arts of Islam, featuring exquisite illustrated manuscripts, and a show of calligraphic art by the Tunisian Nja Mahdaoui. The bridge allows two-way traffic.

"Initatives like this are the only way for us to live in peace," says al-Khamis Kanoo. "I studied in Paris, and so for me to see great western music performed here by the greatest musicians this evening is overwhelming. Insh'allah, all the other cultural developments over the next decade will strengthen that bridge."

Some, though, are sceptical that the £3bn investment in constructing museums is enough. "The buildings themselves," says Wissman, "are nothing." This seems to be an overstatement - there are many in London, New York or Paris who would bite your hand off for institutions like these built by such great names - but Wissman makes a good point, particularly about the fate of the performing arts on Saadiyat Island. It's easy to see how the museums could be stocked with treasures, harder to see who is going to be filling the opera house in Hadid's centre out of season. "Without the spirit and commitment to put things in those beautiful buildings, this will all be a waste of time," says Wissman. Indeed, one can imagine, centuries hence, the temples to culture that are rising on Saadiyat Island becoming Ozymandian ruins, collapsing into the sand for want of human nurturing as did the civilisation of Shelley's sonnet.

"It won't be like that," insists Wissman. "What impresses me is the spirit in Abu Dhabi, the commitment to making culture real." Let's hope he's right: what is growing in Abu Dhabi will either be one of the biggest cultural flowerings the world has ever seen, or the dampest squib a desert has ever known.

Today's best video

Latest reviews

Today in pictures