Intermezzo

Minimalism and not minimalism

Fifty Years of Minimalism - Kings Place, 24-26 November 2011
(Katia & Marielle Labèque pianos, Nicola Tescari keyboard, David Chalmin electric guitar, Massimo Pupillo bass guitar, Raphaël Séguinier percussion, Matthew Barley cello)

This three night series came across as less an exploration of Minimalism than a (largely successful) attempt to serve up rock and contemporary classical music on the same plate without causing indigestion. It didn't offer an beginners' overview and it didn't confine itself to Minimalism - the vast and varied forces required to cover the canonical works would hardly squeeze into little Kings Place, let alone its budget.

What's on in London in December

The Royal Opera House will be hoping for a Xmas tingle in the cash registers as they dust off a selection of tried and tested offerings for the festive season. First up are the faded charms of Der Rosenkavalier, tinselled up for its omgyetanother revival with Soile Isokoski, Sophie Koch and Lucy Crowe. Kirill Petrenko conducts.

The syrup-drenched and even more ancient La bohème returns with luxuriously-costumed operatubbies pleading unconvincing poverty beneath its spacious mansards. Andris Nelsons, Paul Wynne Griffiths and Maurizio Benini conduct, though not at the same time, and the mix'n'match casts include Piotr Beczala, Hibla Gerzmava and Rebecca Evans amongst many, many others.

More appealing, and certainly cheaper, might be the child-friendly Enchanted Pig in the Linbury Studio, complete with starring swine flu survivor.

Otherwise it's a ballet-heavy month at Covent Garden. So where have all the singers gone? Wigmore Hall's December line up includes recitals by Christine Brewer, Christian Gerhaher, Bejun Mehta, Patricia Rosario, Sergei Leiferkus, Ewa Podles and on 22 December Julius Drake's 50th birthday concert features Sophie Daneman, Alice Coote, Joyce Didonato, Derek Lee Ragin, Ian Bostridge, Mark Padmore, Gerald Finley and Christopher Maltman. Not bad.

ENO meanwhile lumber on with their limp Messiah and ghastly Turandot before surrendering the premises to ballet for the next few months. If curiosity can't keep you away, don't pay more than £20 for a ticket.

The most promising of many competing Messiahs looks to be the Barbican's 9 December offering with the English Concert conducted by Harry Bicket and featuring Lucy Crowe, Patricia Bardon, Allan Clayton and James Rutherford.

Also at the Barbican (on 3 and 6 December) is Sir Colin Davis's eagerly-awaited concert version of Verdi's Otello with Torsten Kerl, Gerald Finley, Allan Clayton and Anne Schwanewilms. 

Birmingham Opera Company's version offers an alternative Othello for anyone willing to make the trip. With a reduced orchestra and mostly local singers, it promises an interactive experience as cast and audience are manoeuvred around a Birmingham warehouse. (The BBC's Culture Show on 3 December will delve further).

At Kings Place, the Classical Opera Company (of recent Artaxerxes fame) celebrate Handel in Italy with a selection of his vocal music including Il trionfo del Tempo e del Disinganno on 3 and 5 December.

And the following week, Transition_Projects take over King's Place for a series of recitals under the heading Darkness and Light. Soprano Claire Booth features in several - a highlight should be her Pierrot Lunaire (left) with accompanying video on 11 December.

At the cinema, La Scala's prima, which is Carmen featuring Jonas Kaufmann, will be broadcast live to Covent Garden Odeon on 7 December. And Contes d'Hoffmann comes live from the Met on 19 December - at the time of writing the BFI IMAX still has tickets.

Test driving Kings Place

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.

Fresh from the Guardian dictionery

 

 

As seen at the sandwich bar of London's latest music venue, Kings Place.

Which, not uncoincidentally, shares its premises with those spellcheck-dodgers at Teh Grauniad.

teh close up:
 

All photos by intermezzo.typepad.com

A bijou venuette or stadium opera - your choice, Londoners

Today's Evening Standard takes a breather from Ken-bashing to report on London's newest concert hall, the bijou King's Place, behind Kings Cross station. It's due to open on 1 October, and will share the building with, amongst others, the London Sinfonietta, the OAE and the Guardian.

There's a minifest to open with, and later on, Haydn and Mozart operas. No formal schedules are available yet, though I've seen the odd date noted on individual artists' websites.

At 420 seats, capacity is similar to the Wigmore Hall, though judging from the photo above, the stage is a little larger. Its success may depend on who can be lured into appearing -- although the Wigmore and St Luke's can sell out instantly for popular artists, seats can be far from filled for the less well-known. Celebrity, it's all about celebrity.

At the other end of the scale, the 20,000 seater O2 is going classical, starting with a production of Carmina Burana 'featuring light projections and fireworks'. Carmen and Aida are planned for next year. It may sound ridiculous to stage an opera in what equates to a football stadium but the Verona Festival proves there's a market for it. I think I'll stick with Covent Garden though. South of the river'n'that.