Priority case for Sajid Javid. The South Bank should be the nation's cultural flagship, if only because it's gobbled millions. Since the South Bank management, The Arts Council England and the Guardian, formerly a newspaper, are far too cosy together, it will take a strong-minded Culture Minister to cut through the coterie.
From Douglas Cooksey :
"Dr Johnson is famously remembered for his quote that when a man is tired of London he is tired of Life. Having now lived in London for almost 50 years, I can say with some confidence that I am emphatically not yet tired of Life. However, in common with - one suspects - a great many genuine music lovers, there is a sense of total frustration at what has been happening at what we must now apparently call 'London’s Southbank Centre'.
From Douglas Cooksey :
"Dr Johnson is famously remembered for his quote that when a man is tired of London he is tired of Life. Having now lived in London for almost 50 years, I can say with some confidence that I am emphatically not yet tired of Life. However, in common with - one suspects - a great many genuine music lovers, there is a sense of total frustration at what has been happening at what we must now apparently call 'London’s Southbank Centre'.
"Of course all things change,
sometimes for the better, sometimes for the worse. It would be completely unreasonable and
stultifying to expect them to remain the same. However, despite a renovation
costing in the region of £100 million, the Royal Festival Hall has declined
from its original status as one of the World’s great concert halls, spoken of
in the same breath as Vienna’s Musikverein, Chicago’s Orchestra Hall or
Amsterdam’s Concertgebouw, and has sunk into a sort of pervasive self-inflicted
squalor.
"What other major concert hall
in the World permits unfettered access to all levels to members of the
public, even during concerts? Previously at RFH one had to show a ticket for an
event before proceeding to an upper
level. Now, however these uppe- level areas are used as free Central London
meeting space for all sorts of unrelated groups, even amazingly on occasion for
groups of people dossing down to sleep.
"During one of Lorin Maazel’s
recent Philharmonia concerts there was actually a children’s party in progress
with children screaming and running riot at every level. Prior to this concert
my partner and I were amazed to find couples with buggies picnicking on the
upper levels, even directly outside the main entrance to the Stalls. A new low
came when the public address system announced the start of the concert in 3
minutes time and the voraciously picnicking couple next to us swore loudly
because the announcement had woken their child in his buggy.
"The opening up of the Royal
Festival Hall to all-comers has also had discriminatory and Health & Safety consequences. In the first place, totally
free access at all times has meant that older concertgoers now have little or
no chance of a seat before, during the interval or after a performance because
every seat in the public areas tends to be already occupied by people working on
their laptops or by ad hoc group
seminars, frequently being addressed by a speaker. When an older person may
have made a long journey from, say, Bristol
to attend a particular concert, only to be denied a seat by freeloaders, it clearly
discriminates against the elderly and infirm, and is a strong disincentive for
them to attend.
"More fundamentally, with
several times as many people as originally planned now using the building at
all times of day, there are genuine Health and Safety concerns; for instance, earlier
this week I took two Czech and German friends to a concert, one of them a former
member of a professional all-girl punk band (and therefore probably well used
to touring insalubrious venues), and they were appalled to be confronted with
three out of five toilets completely blocked. (Incidentally Arsenal’s Emirates
Stadium, which holds around 60,000 people, is an object lesson in the matter of
hygiene and I was going to say that RFH would do well to take a leaf out of its
book!) With the hall now in constant use
throughout the day, mountains of garbage regularly accumulate in its
waste bins and - leaving aside the stench - this should surely be investigated
by Health & Safety as a matter of urgency.
"What is so depressing is that
this is no slide into genteel poverty caused by lack of investment or by an ageing
infrastructure – after all we’ve just spent more than £100 million renovating
the hall - but largely the result of a series of conscious decisions by a
perverse and unpleasant management operating to its own agenda which appears to
seek to turn the hall into a “People’s Palace”, available to all people all the
time. Regular concertgoers clearly now come a poor second. One has only to look
at the Southbank’s monthly programme, where classical music is now relegated to
the last 4 pages of a 28 page A4 booklet, to realise where the present regime (for that is what it is) sees its
priorities. When just before Christmas the Philharmonia Orchestra wanted to
announce its forthcoming season at roughly the same time as the LSO’s at the
Barbican, I am given to understand that the orchestra was ‘instructed’ by the
Southbank’s Management that it could not do this until some 5 weeks later, thus
putting the Philharmonia at an unfair competitive disadvantage with their main
rivals.
"Serious music lovers are now
forgoing the Royal Festival Hall in increasing numbers, put off by the
unpleasant surroundings. Who wants to emerge from a concert as that sublime
final paragraph of Mahler’s 4th symphony 'Kein Musik is ja nicht auf
Erden' ('No music like this is heard on Earth') fades into complete silence only
to be confronted with pounding rock music from a party on the ground floor or
by the raucous din of drink-fuelled hordes of revellers on the terrace.
"The Royal Festival Hall was
erected as a temporary structure and has never been a wholly satisfactory venue
for orchestral music but despite its faults we grew to love it, not least for
the memories of all those great performances and great performers we heard
there – Klemperer, Karajan, Stokowski,
Barbirolli, Boult, Celibidache, Giulini, Carlos Kleiber and even those two
legendary Toscanini concerts – but perhaps it should now be turned over to GLC
Parks & Leisure and a new ‘fit for purpose’ acoustically satisfactory
concert hall like Birmingham’s built at a location with good transport
connections such as Kings Cross. Above all it should be managed by a team in
sympathy with its primary purpose as a place for music, not as a public space. In
the wake of various Parliamentary scandals and an upcoming General Election we
are almost certainly on the point of ridding ourselves of a swathe of career
politicians who have existed wholly within the Westminster bubble, impervious, even
contemptuous of public opinion. Perhaps now is also the moment to see the back
of career arts administrators and to appoint some new blood."
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