Wolfgang Rihm at 60, London Sinfonietta, Queen Elizabeth Hall, 24 January 2012

Rihm: Ricercare – music in memoriam Luigi Nono

Rebecca Saunders: Quartet

Jorg Widmann: Dubairische Tanze

Rihm: Nach-Schrift

Rihm: Will Sound More Again

Wolfgang Rihm has packed a lot into his first 60 years. Both the quantity and the consistent quality of his music mark him out as one of today's greatest living composers. He certainly deserves the international tributes that will be marking his birthday year. He's not much of a traveller though, and it is rare for him to leave his native Karlseruhe, which may explain why he didn't join us this evening.

The concert was a bit of a mixed bag. The sheer scale of Rihm's output makes it difficult to frame any single concert as a survey. But the London Sinfonietta have done a good job over the years to introduce British audiences to his latest works. This evening's programme was in the same spirit, with four UK premieres from the man himself and two pieces from his most distinguished pupils, Rebecca Saunders and Jorg Widmann.

The Ricercare with which the concert opened is one of four pieces Rihm wrote in the wake of the death of Luigi Nono. At first appearances, the two composers would seem to share very little, but Rihm obviously thinks otherwise. This piece, for a bass-heavy ensemble including bass clarinet, contrabassoon and contrabass trombone, inhabits an aesthetic somewhere between those of the two composers. It takes the abrupt, impulsive gestures that Nono used to punctuate his serial textures, but tones them done to the more civilised level at which Rihm works. It progresses by fits and starts, often with silences between the gestures, more a Nono trait that one we might associate with Rihm. It's not his greatest work by any means, but it was certainly interesting to hear the composer in a more reflective mood than pervades his more famous scores.

Rebecca Saunders deserves far more exposure in her native country than she has so far received. She may have brought this relative neglect on herself though by adopting a thoroughly German aesthetic, one which fits very comfortably into a portrait concert for her former teacher. The title Quartet doesn't tell us much, apart perhaps to imply that relationships between four instruments are to be explored. She picks the unlikely combination of piano, double bass, accordion and bass clarinet. So, as in the first piece, the textures are decidedly bass-heavy. But Saunders has a trick up her sleeve – she understands the range of extended techniques that are available on the accordion (in this case a button bayan-type instrument), and she is able to continuously vary the textures through her imaginative writing for it. The combination of clarinet and accordion turns out to be productive, as does the combination of plucked bass and plucked piano strings. As the piece progresses, the piano becomes more civilised, settling into a repeated chord sequence, while the bass becomes more wayward, repeatedly detuning the strings to move closer and closer to unpitched noise. The piece went on five minutes longer than its material justified, but that's hardly unusual in new music.

A considerably less satisfying offering was made by Jorg Widmann, whose Dubairische Tanze was designed as a send up of the oom-pah music of his native Bavaria. So there was plenty of woodwind and brass melodies with over-the-top percussion, all made dissonant to make sure the audience was aware of the composer's self parody. It was awful, just awful. Embarrassingly unfunny and, unlike Saunders' score, which only overstayed its welcome by five minutes, this one seemed to go on for ever. Are the London Sinfonietta trying to sabotage Widmann's stratospheric international career? Or maybe they just want to demonstrate that all those stereotypes about the Germans and their sense of humour are actually true.

Looking round the hall at the interval, the audience was pretty meagre, especially considering the stature of the composer it was celebrating. One problem may have been overkill – the BBC SO put on a very good Rihm day a year or two ago at the Barbican, which may have satisfied the curiosity of most. And speaking of the Barbican, I hear that the Kronos Quartet were playing Black Angels there tonight, presumably swallowing up a considerable proportion of the new music audience. After 20 minutes of that Widmann score, I wished I'd gone to the Barbican myself.

Fortunately, the concert turned a corner in the second half. The last two works on the programme were both classic Rihm: pieces for chamber orchestra sized ensemble, each a part of one of his ongoing cycles, and each fabulously constructed. This is what the composer does best, works for medium sized ensemble, structured as a single movement, but otherwise inscrutable in terms of their internal form. Nach-Schrift was the best work on the programme by a wide margin. The piece is for ensemble and a pianist, who is described as a soloist although he really provides more of an obbligato over the top of the orchestral textures. And what fascinating textures they are! Ideas and harmonies constantly appear, some clearly new, some adapted from earlier music. But the sheer sense of life in this music, and its continuous invention, set it apart from the work of most composers writing today.

The performances this evening were all good, and the players managed to convey that sense of life and energy which is the composer's currency. Andrew Zolinsky was a proficient soloist/obbligatist in Nach-Schrift. Conductor Thierry Fischer is little known in the capital for his work with new music, but his clear, incisive baton technique is exactly what these scores need. There were a few small ensemble problems here and there, the two percussionists set at opposite sides of the stage in the first piece didn't always quite synch with the ensemble for instance, but in general the many technical challenges of these scores were well handled.

The last piece, Will Sound More Again, came as a surprise, as it showed us Rihm's rarely encountered lighter side. This too is a piece of small orchestra, which runs at a fairly continuous tempo for about 20 minutes. But there are all sorts of flourishes and light touches, from the bizarre saxophone duet at the beginning to the accordion being parodied by the percussion near the end. All of which goes to show, despite evidence to the contrary earlier on, that perhaps the Germans do have a sense of humour after all.

London Sinfonietta: Woolrich, Feshareki, Davies, Ades, Messiaen. Kings Place 1.7.11

John Woolrich: The Night will not draw on

Shiva Feshareki: departing in peace, arriving with love world premiere

Tansy Davies: Tymbal Organ world premiere

John Woolrich :A Presence of Departed Acts

Thomas Adès: Court Studies from The Tempest

Olivier Messiaen: Quartor pour la fin du temps 

Most new music concerts seem obsessed with ideas of beginnings and of new directions. How refreshing, then, to meet a programme dedicated to the exact opposite, to ideas of departure and conclusion. And despite the Quartet for the End of Time dominating the evening, the whole programme was impressively balanced and coherent.

The evening was curated by John Woolrich, and the concert opened with his The Night will not draw on. This piano trio is filled with everything that is best about Woolrich's music. The ideas are strong and clearly presented, force is used, but never for its own sake, and the form is direct but never to the point of pedantry. The work was commissioned to commemorate the bicentenary of Haydn's death, but beyond the instrumentation it is difficult to think of any connections with Haydn's work. But no matter, it is a fine piece in its own right, and an impressive example of how a traditional instrumental grouping can be reinvigorated without worrying unduly about the weight of history behind it.

arriving in peace, departing in love was a late addition to the programme from Shiva Feshareki, a young composer who has been participating on a London Sinfonietta education programme. On the evidence of this short but accomplished work for solo clarinet, no further education is necessary. Her knowledge of the clarinet is impressive in itself, and while none of the extended techniques are new, the way that they are integrated into the substance of the music is impressive. So for example, she will include Gershwin-esque glissandos, but then she will write whole phrases with the player sliding around the individual registers. Growls from the throat play a big part in the music, and again, the way that they seem so integrated into the ideas really focusses the work. The form is either obscure or non-existent, but that hardly matters when the relationships between the various timbres can hold the work together.

The other première in the programme was Tymbal Organ by Tansy Davies. I was less impressed with this one, although it essentially did the same things as Feshareki's work. Davies writes for violin and cello, and there are some interesting effects in there, like a cello glissando involving all four fingers on the same string to create microtonal shifts as the fingers go up and down within the broader context of the glissando. Considering how difficult it is to describe this effect, I dread to think how it is notated. There is a lot of tapping on the body of the instruments, which becomes interesting when it happens in rhythmic unison with bowed notes on the other. In general, the textures are heterophonic, occasionally based on fragile unisons, but more often with one player leading the other through the sequences of notes and textures.

Thomas Ades really showed his compatriots how it is done with his Court Studies for 'The Tempest'. These short vignettes, conveniently scored for the same ensemble as the Messiaen, are apparently freely adapted from the opera, and they certainly feel like they have been drawn from a broader soundscape. Like Messiaen, Ades is able to not only transcend, but completely ignore the apparent restrictions of musical scope imposed by the use of just four instruments. There are shades of Britten here, more in the mood than in the actual rhythmic of harmonic language. Or perhaps Britten is simply invoked by the sheer mastery of instrumentation and colour that Ades, despite his youth, is able to draw on.

Quartet for the End of Time is one of the few 'Modern' works to be regularly performed by core-repertoire ensembles. With that in mind, it was very interesting to hear it played by new music specialists. These players know their Andriessen and they know Gorecki, so they know how to turn things up to 11. The dogged intensity that persists through many of the movements was impressively conveyed, and it really filled the resonant space of the Kings Place hall. There was emotion here too, but not a hint of sentimentality. It was a crisp and precise performance, but never cold or calculated. In fact, the whole concert was impressively played. Only four players where involved, and virtuoso feats were expected of all at one point or another. But nothing fazed them, and we were treated to an evening of close to ideal performances.

Birtwistle, Maxwell Davies, London Sinfonietta 16 June 2011

Leigh Melrose (baritone), London Sinfonietta, Baldur Brönnimann (conductor), Queen Elizabeth Hall, London, 16.6.11 

Birtwistle: Virelai

Birtwistle: Secret Threatre

Maxwell Davies: Eight Songs for a Mad King

On first appearances, the Southbank's annual Meltdown Festival would seem to revel in the randomness of its programming. What other festival would include a concert of Birtwistle and Maxwell Davies for which the programme is filled almost exclusively with essays about Ray Davies? But there is logic here, and the London Sinfonietta's contribution to this year's event sits squarely at the centre of its theme. Davies oversees a the festival in the year of the 60^th anniversary of the Festival of Britain, so Britishness, eccentricity and innovation are the guiding principles of the programming. And what better contribution could the London Sinfonietta make than a concert featuring seminal works from two of this county's greatest and most eccentric composers?

Performances of Birtwistle's Secret Theatre are frustratingly rare, so it is just as well that the piece is just as good on record. What you miss from the CD are the movements around the stage. An empty platform is set up to the left of the ensemble, and as players join the main melodic line, they move over to it, forming a sort of variable concertante group. But the musical distinction between what happens on and off the platform is clear enough, so this isn't really necessary. The performance from the London Sinfonietta was passionate and dramatic....I say the London Sinfonietta, but the ensemble seems to have turned into a scratch band, with different players on the stage every time they perform. I think there were a total of three performers this evening that I had heard perform as part of the Sinfonietta before. The changes don't seem to be affecting the standards too much, although the ensemble of the woodwinds wasn't as tight as in the past, and the control of the brass sound in the climaxes could have been better.

The concert opened with a more recent Birtwistle score, Virelai. Nothing of any particular interest to report here I'm afraid. Some renaissance tunes are given the Birtwistle treatment, played out of synch with their accompaniments and subjected to some exotic orchestration. Technically, it all works, and composer is still able to give everything he writes that amazing sense of inner purpose that makes every compositional decision seem providential. But programming it with one of his greatest scores does this new work little justice.

The Eight Songs for a Mad King also have a tendency to overshadow, and they were certainly the main attraction this evening. The performance could perhaps be described as semi-staged, without props or costumes, and certainly without cages. But what really matters in a performance of this work is the soloist, and Leigh Melrose put in a formidable performance. He has a great voice, but his acting ability is what makes him ideal for the role. He is a tall man, with long gangly limbs. He was lit from above by a single spotlight, and that was about all the staging support he got, yet he was utterly convincing. The work calls for a soloist who is a singer, a speaker, an actor, a performer in the broadest sense, and Melrose ticks all the boxes. The vocal requirements are beyond the realms of possibility, so it seems churlish to list the few failings of his musical performance. For instance, the first octave of his falsetto is clear and penetrating, but the octave above that lacks power. Of course it does, it is hardly worth noting. The instrumentalists gave him excellent support, sometimes competing with him at the climaxes, but that is in the spirit of the piece too. I thought it was a shame that the London Sinfonietta gave away the twist in the violin part (which I'm not going to reveal here) implicitly in the programme note and explicitly on Twitter a few hours before the performance. Perhaps everyone in the audience had heard it before, but I doubt it.

Certainly, nobody in the audience will have seen the part of the mad king acted as well as this before. The evening was a fair one for the London Sinfonietta (whoever they are), a worthy contribution to Ray Davies' Meltdown Festival, and a triumph for Leigh Melrose.

Unsuk Chin Total Immersion Day

Total Immersion: Unsuk Chin
BBC SO, Barbican, London 9.4.11

My first thought when I heard about this day dedicated to the music of Unsuk Chin was that it is about time British audiences got a chance to hear the music of a composer that the Germans have been raving about for years. But on consulting the programme, it seems I am out of the loop; every piece bar one had been played in the UK before. There was one London première and one 'London public première' suggesting that I have just been mixing in the wrong circles and if you know the right people, Chin's music is easily accessible.

For those less privileged, Unsuk Chin is a name that only really relates to Proms programmes, but from those it is clear that she is a major talent with impressive contacts with top class players. The other fact about Chin that rarely goes unstated is that she studied with Ligeti. Apparently their personal relationship was stormy, but all relationships with Ligeti were stormy so that's not necessarily significant. It is tempting to define her music purely through comparison with the great Hungarian master. That would do her a disservice, but his unique soundworld clearly haunts her musical psyche. Like Ligeti, she is drawn to nonsense lyrics and (not coincidentally) also to Lewis Carroll. Her piano etudes (of which we heard two) are a direct continuation of her teacher's. More significantly, textures and effects that are clearly Ligeti trademarks keep turning up in her scores. So, for example, the conclusion of Kala is made up of unsynchronised descending scales in the choir over a sustained pedal in the woodwind – just like the Kyrie from Ligeti's Requiem, Acrostic Wordplay combines phonetic sounds from the vocal soloist with erratic ensemble textures (Aventures), in the Violin Concerto, the harpsichord suddenly bursts in with what sounds like a quotation from Continuum, and in Su (the sheng concerto) there is a point where all the percussionists put down their sticks and start playing harmonicas, just like in Sippal, Dobbel...

But with the exception of these alarming calls from beyond the grave, Chin has a distinctive voice. She is not as regimented as Ligeti, and prefers messy textures – more clouds than clocks. Like Ligeti she writes acoustic music that is informed by prior experiences in the electronic studio, but unlike Ligeti, those experiences also produced electronic works worth listening to. It is difficult to categorise Chin's work in terms of ethnicity or gender, except to say that there is an intrinsic sense of outsideness that prevents her from taking anything in Western Classical culture too seriously.

The day began at the Guildhall School, with a talk from Jonathan Cross and performances by pianist Claire Hammond and violinist Jenna Sherry. Hammond had planned to perform all six of the Etudes, but illness last week prevented here from preparing more than two. So we got a double performance of Double Bind? for violin and electronics instead. It is a fascinating work, which in this interpretation involves the guts from the remote control of a Wii strapped to the bottom of the violin so that the electronic devices can track its movement. Listening to it twice demonstrated how every performance is different in terms of the dynamic and synchronisation of the live electronics. Sadly, it turned out in the talk later on that the composer gets very distressed by that variability and it is one of the reasons she does not work with live electronics on a regular basis.

The London Sinfonietta gave a lunchtime concert that consisted of Gougalon, Acrostic Wordplay and the Double Concerto (only the name borrowed from Ligeti in this case). Gougalon relates to Chin's first and recent visit to China and is almost narrative in its structure and tone painting. Acrostic Wordplay is the piece that made her famous, a song cycle for soprano and ensemble. I think the comparison with Ligeti's Aventures is fair, but this is much gentler music, and perhaps the composer's oriental background shows through in her reluctance to push contrasts or extremes. The Double Concerto for piano and percussion shows this even more clearly. Chin said in the talk later on that she is not very interested in the standard orchestra (when she was asked what standard orchestration was she replied 'Brahms') which was why she always adds so much percussion. Yet she is commissioned to write orchestral music so that is what happens. Similarly, I think, with her many concertos, written at the behest of willing and able collaborators, and not out of any loyalty to the genre. So the relationship between the soloists and the ensemble is not her starting point when it comes to concertos, basically they are all in it together. In the Double Concerto, there is a percussion soloist and a percussionist in the ensemble, but both seem to do about the same amount. All excellently played under Unsuk Chin specialist Stefan Asbury, and with competent soloists. I couldn’t help wondering, though, what is in it for them, all of whom are expected to play exceptionally difficult solo parts, but without any bravura or show.

The screening of the Alice in Wonderland was one of the most insightful aspects of the day, and while it is (as yet) the composer's only opera, it is clearly a statement of intent. The score is powerful and seems energised by the sheer absurdity of the text. Chin sets the story in a surprisingly literal way. The surrealism of the staging is at odds with the basically narrative structure of the music, a disparity explained by the fact that this first production was designed and directed by the Brecht protégé Achim Freyer. Unsuk Chin said that she had initially been shocked by the liberties taken by the director, but now that she has seen a second, more literal, production, she has realised how good the original is. Perhaps the most radical aspect of the show was the filming for video by Ellen Fellman. Freyer positions Alice at the centre of a large square tableau and leaves her there for the entire opera. Obviously, just locking off a camera at the back of the stalls would make for uninteresting viewing, so instead Fellman introduces a range of camera techniques – handheld, moving in and out of focus, splitscreen...It's all very effective and fully in keeping with the spirit of the production. The film is available on DVD (Unitel A0501647) and is well worth a look.

Like the lunchtime concert, the evening event by the BBC SO succeeded largely because of the excellent choice of conductor, the incomparable Ilan Volkov. I had despaired of every seeing him on the London stage again after the news broke of his move to Iceland. But he to is a Chin specialist and is a conductor who really cares about new music, ensuring that any performance under his command is well rehearsed and coordinated.

The event must have been a logistical nightmare for the BBC. Chin's scores require so much percussion that the stage had to be extended forward about six metres. This blocked the fire escapes in the stalls and meant that a large proportion of the audience had to sit upstairs. And two twenty minute intervals were needed to move the percussion instruments around between works. Each time it was worth the wait, but it meant the concert went on until almost 11.

The first piece, Kala is essentially a cantata. The music is interesting and never overly complicated. As much as anything else, the score shows the composer's facility not only with writing for large orchestra, but also choir and soloists. It was a good performance, although neither of the solo singers excelled, probably because the bass was a last minute stand in (sorry, didn't catch the name) and the soprano, Sarah Tynan, is pregnant.

The next piece was Chin's Violin Concerto, for which she won the Grawemeyer Prize. To be honest, I couldn't see what all the fuss was about. It is slightly closer to the traditional concerto model than most of her other works in the genre, it is in movements for example. But it is yet another example of a concertante work where the soloist sweats buckets but to no appreciable effect. There are some interesting orchestral effects, but that's not what a violin concerto should be about.

Rocana is Chin's first work for orchestra without soloist, giving a much better excuse for her to explore the potential of the large orchestra. She gave herself (or perhaps her commission gave her) a good twenty minutes to explore all her various ideas around, in this case, the idea of light. The expansive format really works for Chin's music, and it also avoids the frustration of watching a soloist who you can't really hear.

By rights, the final work, Su, a sheng concerto, ought to have been the worst culprit for inaudible solo playing. But no, the orchestration is done very sensitively, and as Chin explained, she wanted the orchestra to act like another sheng. (A sheng, by the way, is a kind of Chinese mouth organ with bamboo pipes arranged vertically.) The soloist was Wu Wei, who played an instrument of his own design, with complex keywork around the pipes to make it fully chromatic. The piece is a triumph, and was the ideal conclusion to the day, genuinely new and interesting, and suggesting all sorts of allegories of East-meets-West by which to neatly summarise the work of this unique composer.

Day One at Kings Place

Attending the opening day of a major new venue is a fascinating experience. Everything works, more or less, but every activity is taking place for the first time, and nothing runs smoothly. Visitors are not sure where they are going and are greeted by an army of guiders on entering the building. No one has quite worked out how to use the touch screen systems on the cash registers or the volume controls for the public announcements. And the pretence that the construction work has been completed on schedule is soon dispelled by the sound of hammering and sawing from the floor above.
Teething troubles only, no doubt, but there is a sense at Kings Place that everyone is out to impress. This is the first day of a week-long opening extravaganza for the venue, with its two halls hosting 100 concerts running morning, noon and night. Those who have made it in early for the first, a 9.30 am concert by the London-based Endymion Ensemble, are in a receptive mood and are ready to forgive the minor inconveniences.
The opening of Kings Place is a significant event in London’s musical life. It is the first purpose built classical music venue to open in the city since the Barbican Centre in 1982. Its business model is markedly different to those of other venues. The project is privately financed, and the venue will be expected to pay its own way, without the government subsidies that keep most of the UK’s classical music afloat. The visual and performing arts part of the Kings Place project is intended as the welcoming public face of a building that will otherwise accommodate smart offices. Which is not to say that the music venues will rely on the office rents for subsidy. Peter Millican, the CEO and driving force behind the project is confident that conference and business events hosted in the halls themselves will provide the funding they require.
One variable in this equation is the future prosperity of the area. Kings Place is located just behind Kings Cross station to the north of the city centre. The location is central enough to prosper, and the public transport links offered by the twin stations of Kings Cross and St Pancras are among the best in London, with suburban, national, and even international trains (from the channel tunnel) terminating here. Besides Kings Place, the major development prospect for the area is a project called Kings Cross Central, a housing, shopping and entertainment complex planned for a site on the opposite side of the road. But work has yet to begin there, and for now Kings Place stands in splendid isolation with its elegant modern facade of rippling blue glass set against a background of dilapidated housing blocks, various rail sheds and a petrol station.
The first impression on entering the building (after having been copiously greeted and directed) is of a distinctly corporate environment. Not surprising considering this is the foyer of an office block. The ground floor is given over to cafes, a restaurant, a small gallery facing onto the street and a very small box office. (Online ticket buying is encouraged, with airline style dynamic pricing to encourage early booking with lower prices.) Escalators at the far end descend into the basement arts space. No Nibelheim this, but rather a well lit atrium consisting of an art gallery spread across two floors and doubling as a foyer space for the two concert halls. The upper floor of the gallery is a balcony stretching around the four walls, wide enough to be considered a mezzanine but leaving enough headroom for the lower floor to be considered grand. Each day of the opening week begins with a performance of Ligeti’s Poème Symphonique for 100 metronomes, with its clockwork performers lined up around the edge of the balcony. In this context, the work is more installation art than music, as the metronomes are virtually inaudible over the ambient foyer noise.
The metronomes could be considered a statement of artistic intent, but only in that they demonstrate the diversity of the music on offer. Another unusual feature of the Kings Place project is that no single artistic director has been appointed. Short concert series will be staged with relative artistic independence, each running to just a handful of performances. The hope is that, rather than being seen to lack artistic focus, the venue will gain a reputation for diversity and appeal to multiple audience groups. Western classical music will be the core element of the programming, but jazz, world music, dance events and the spoken word will all appear on the schedules. The initial programming matches this diversity with an impressive quantity of events, suggesting that the aim of this first season is to find a foothold for the venture in as many cultural sectors as possible.
The combination of diversity and quantity is also reflected in the use of the available space. The main hall has only 400 seats, but there is also a second hall of 200 seats and a variety of other rehearsal, education and, of course, conference spaces. Hall two is effectively a studio space and has been designed with diversity of use in mind; the seating is movable and the acoustics tailored for various forms of amplified sound.
But the excitement in London leading up to the opening of the venue has been generated by hall one and the acoustic it offers. There has long been a feeling in London that the city’s classical music is poorly served by the concert halls in which it is performed. There is a hope that Kings Place may go some way to putting this to rights.
Stepping into the hall, the first aural impression is of leaving the ambience of the resonant atrium behind. In fact, the hall sits on rubber feet to shield it from the inevitable vibrations from the major transport hub next door. The hall is a classic shoebox, making the acoustic easier to model and control. The walls are panelled with oak with a variety of angled surfaces in rectangular recesses to texture the sound. The seating is slightly raked, providing excellent sight lines, and a balcony around all four walls also offers a range of fine vantage points. The upper third or so of the hall in linded with large rectangular arcades, and the resonance can be controlled with movable curtains behind. The sound is both warm and clear, proximity to the performers being an obvious advantage of the small scale. Inevitably, the sound varies according to position, but for my money the front of the stalls and the side balconies offer the greatest transparency. The concerts scheduled for the opening day, ten in all, included chamber instrumental works in the morning, lieder recitals in the afternoon and 18th century opera excerpts in the evening. In the instrumental works, the detail of the sound is the most impressive feature. Even the keys of the new Steinway rising to their resting positions are audible. In the vocal music, the florid resonance was the key feature, not overbearing but rich and satisfying.
Kings Place is primarily a chamber music venue, so the natural comparison is with the Wigmore Hall, the undisputed home of chamber music in London. Thankfully, the Kings Place acoustic offers a very different sound. It’s certainly clearer and warmer, but the Wigmore’s dryer, more traditional sound is likely to remain the preference of many. Whichever way, the Wigmore Hall’s status as the centre of all things chamber music in London seems secure.
But unless the new venue draws audiences away from existing halls, it is difficult to see how it can remain viable. Discussion of Kings Place in the UK media has been split fairly evenly between praise for the acoustic in its main hall and concern over its business model. The audience base for classical music in London is estimated to be around 30,000, and many are of the opinion that existing venues can more than meet this demand. To succeed, Kings Place will have to either poach business from other venues or expand this core audience through innovative programming and marketing. The evidence so far is that they are planning to do both.
The odds may be stacked against the long-term viability of Kings Place as a music venue, but Millican and his colleagues have brought sound business sense to the project, with a number of impressive supporting strands weighing in its favour. The Orchestra of the Age of the Enlightenment and the London Sinfonietta, the UKs leading period instrument ensemble and contemporary music group respectively have moved their offices to Kings Place, and each has been given a prime office space at a peppercorn rent. Both ensembles are now officially resident in the hall. This will bring excellent publicity, especially given how well the acoustic will match their respective sounds. Another cultural coup has been to sign up the Guardian and Observer newspapers as the first commercial tenants, papers with a reputation for thorough and enthusiastic performing arts coverage.
Kings Place is a venue with a distinctly corporate atmosphere, an arts project based on a venture capital business model. Peter Millican himself admits to having virtually no experience of arts management, but his track record with major business ventures is enviable. He is not expecting the Kings Place concert halls to make a profit, but he is expecting them to break even. Today’s financial climate makes any talk of long-term stability seem optimistic, and Millican is clearly an optimist. But he has shrewd business sense and creative ideas about how the project can work. The fine acoustic of his concert hall combined with the diversity and quality of the music he has planned for it make the venue a major asset for London. With any luck the books will balance and Kings Place will become a mainstay for classical music in capital for years to come.