If you aren’t sure how much you’ll be around, it’s probably fine to just wait and buy them at the venues. The exception is the exhibition pass, which lets you into masterclasses that can be a fair ways away from the place where the passes are sold, so if you aren’t planning to go the main exhibition at the Raddisson first, you might want to order one of those from the “web”:http://www.bemf.org.
But those of us who intend to spend the week there usually pore over the booklet and the website and order a bunch of tickets. I used to get the ??Golden Serpent??, which is tickets to everything, but it was a lot more concerts than anyone would want to see in one week. The last time I did it, I actually did manage to sell all the tickets I didn’t want at face value, so it ended up a pretty good deal, but that was enough work that I haven’t bought the Golden Serpent since then.
The last festival I just bought all the tickets I wanted at the lowest possible price. This worked out fine for the normal concerts; for the opera it puts you in the nosebleed section, and everyone else seems to have enjoyed the opera more than I did. So this year I went for the ??Bronze Serpent??, which gives you a B class ticket to the opera and 4 concerts. Then I also got some D (lowest) price tickets to a couple of other concerts, and a couple of the unreserved seating late night concerts.
When you’re deciding how much you can afford for tickets, don’t forget that you’ll also want to see some fringe events, not all of which are free, and buy instruments and music at the exhibition.
If the decision is that you can’t afford as many tickets as you want, one possibility is to “volunteer”:http://www.bemf.org/pages/jobs.htm. They have a complicated system of making sure the less glamorous jobs get covered by making you work a certain number of hours at the exhibition or other daytime events before you get to usher at the concerts or opera. But the ushers do get to see things.
LayMusic.org 