London Sinfonietta / Bhavan musicians - Kings Place, 3 October 2008
New venue Kings Place celebrated its opening last week with a five day, 100 concert festival - all tickets £2.50. I missed the first day, 1 October, but settled in for the Friday evening programme, which featured the London Sinfonietta in Hall One and Indian musicians from the London Bhavan institute in the smaller Hall Two.
First impressions? Well, it's a bit further from King's Cross than the 150 metres their website claims. It felt like a long walk battling up bleak York Way on a cold, windy night. And inside, the signage is hard to find, with confusing pictograms instead of proper directions. But the staff were charming and helpful, and once oriented, it was easy to find everything.
Below is the view from the entrance way on the ground floor. Behind the seating is the escalator which goes down to the concert halls, which are situated in the basement. At the very back is a bar/restaurant (packed out when I visited) with views over the canal area. At the rear left is a sandwich bar, and at the rear right is a staircase down to a mezzanine level with direct access to the balcony of Hall One.
This is the ground floor sandwich bar. Lots of organic and vegetarian stuff, looked edible, which by London concert hall standards is an achievement in itself, though I didn't try anything.
And here is the escalator to the basement. As well as the concert halls, there's a bar and cloakroom downstairs. And a profusion of ladies loos - so many that there weren't any queues, hooray!
The photos above were taken by me (the house policy is simply no photography during performances), but the two below are from the Kings Place website, where you can find several more. They show Hall One, the 420-seat main auditorium. It may look like an Ikea flatpack jobbie, but it's actually clothed in an acre of veneer culled from a single 500 year old Black Forest oak tree. It smells pleasingly of fresh-cut joinery and new carpet, though not for long I suppose.
Seats are comfy with plenty of legroom, though the rake is minimal. Which means if you're stuck behind a fathead, as I was for a couple of concerts, you won't see everything.
But the sound is what really matters, and it's excellent. Clear and bright, and highly directional, with a degree of warmth and reverberence sacrificed for clarity, it should suit just about everything that gets played in there.
For their first concert of the evening, the London Sinfonietta performed a new Philip Cashian piece specially commissioned for the occasion, which used a small ensemble and choir with recorded speech. The choir, perched on the balcony behind the stage, sounded heavenly in every sense of the word, and the instruments, scored in pairs, were notably clear. The measured reading of Messiaen's Quartet for the End of Time which formed their second concert was just as successful acoustically.
They closed the evening with couple of minimalist classics. First up, Steve Reich's Come Out, a stereo-effect recording projected from the front sides of the stage. The directional nature of the acoustic was very noticeable here - there was no sense of the sound 'wrapping' or reverberating or coming from anywhere other than the speakers. Whether this is a positive quality or not will of course depend on what's being performed. Gavin Bryars' Jesus Blood Never Failed Me Yet was as technically perfect a reading as you could ever hope for, but I've heard it once too often to be dumbstruck .
In between the Sinfonietta stuf I stepped into Hall Two for some Indian music, courtesy of a massive ensemble pulled together by the London Bhavan institute. Heavily amplified, it wasn't the best measure of the hall's acoustic, but it did attract the only musician I spotted in the audience all night - well, the only one known to me, anyway - Seb Rochford. This auditorium seems to be wider than it's long, and has loose school chair-type seating. There's no rake, so with the performers seated on the floor of the low stage, it meant little was visible from anywhere behind the front row. Standing at the back would be a good option here.
One of the best things about Kings Place is the ticket prices, which will start at just £9.50 for early bookers, and another is the emphasis on contemporary music, which has struggled to find a home elsewhere in London. Over the next couple of weeks and also every Tuesday there should be plenty to explore.
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