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‘Hear music in different ways in our cross-site takeover,” ran the marketing blurb. “You can choose to listen again, skip and move on to another orchestra or pause to catch up with friends at one of our bars.” The idea is to create a live mix tape in which the six world-class orchestras based at the Southbank Centre each play a short set, repeated throughout the evening, with audiences free to roam between them. The site’s summer’s dance takeover had been imaginative and engaging. Why not do the same for classical music?
It began in the Royal Festival Hall, with the London Philharmonic Orchestra “playing the unforgettable ‘da-da-da-dum’ of Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony”. And, indeed, the opening movement was brisk and the da-da-da-dums were present and correct. Vogue Williams, media personality, model and presenter of Send Nudes: Body SOS welcomed us to the event. “Wasn’t that incredible,” she gushed after the six minutes of the symphony’s first movement. “You must be wrecked,” she told an orchestra who routinely perform 90-minute Mahler symphonies and four-hour operas, but conductor Ed Gardner smiled gamely and moved on to a short medley of Howard Shore’s Lord of the Rings film music.
The finale from Tchaikovsky’s Fourth Symphony followed, whose lurches of mood made little musical sense divorced from the rest of the work. Still, the LPO played it at full throttle and impeccably.
Thereafter the audience was free to choose one of the four other orchestras (in fact, small groups of musicians from each) playing short sets in vastly smaller Southbank spaces. Each set was repeated three times over the next 75 minutes, meaning in theory you could catch most of the music on offer, but did no one do the maths or visualise how the audiences would move through the site? The Royal Festival Hall (which seats 2,700) was full. Disgorge that many people simultaneously into four smaller spaces, whose combined capacity is nowhere near sufficient to cope with such a crowd, and you will inevitably leave much of your audience stuck in bottlenecks. Catching up with friends happened mostly in queues, and too often involved the question, “Have you managed to actually hear anything yet?”
When you did, the results were uneven. Members of the Chineke! Junior Orchestra were arrayed around the Clore Ballroom on individual podiums like exhibits in a gallery, with Yshani Perinpanayagam bravely keeping her disparate troops together to perform the moving Montgomery Variations by Margaret Bonds while the audience wandered between players. Some of the younger performers looked distinctly uncomfortable; a more experienced orchestra and a less intricate piece would surely have been a happier choice here.
In the undercroft beneath the Queen Elizabeth Hall, a handful of musicians from the London Sinfonietta performed three extracts from Steve Reich works. Those lucky enough to squeeze in found the industrial space lit like a nightclub, and in what felt rather polite accounts, Reich’s music still wove its hypnotic magic.
Meanwhile, in the Purcell Room (with a capacity of about 300), players from the Aurora Orchestra were on a musical adventure inspired, apparently, by Gustav and Alma Mahler’s time in the Alps. Audience members “are free to move between stages as they wish” went the blurb, but that was easier said than done: none but the most dedicated of queuers were able to see what musical peaks the Aurora scaled. Still, in the foyer you could enjoy a brass and percussion band from the Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment wearing lederhosen, alpine caps and dirndl dresses (and yes, with the instruments of 19th-century Bavaria) doing a Sound of Music medley and having a whale of a time using beer glasses as percussion and proving they are most definitely game for a laugh.
The Barbican’s Sound Unbound festival showed that classical music in bite-size chunks with an audience free to explore can work incredibly well. There, the music was spread across 19 venues and an entire weekend. Here, mystifyingly, the centre’s second hall, the Queen Elizabeth Hall (capacity about 900) was not being used as a performing space, and there were no duos, trios, quartets or quintets in the vast public spaces on any of the six Royal Festival Hall floors. The audience profile was noticeably younger and more mixed than a usual classical one, but they were poorly served by unambitious programming and abysmal planning.
As everyone was ushered back towards the Royal Festival Hall to hear the finale – the Philharmonia performing two movements of Holst’s The Planets and the Star Wars theme, I decided less was definitely more and fled this dispiriting vision of classical music’s future.
