Music
Snowman on the South Bank
Peter Phillips
The essence of Snowman's work is to have 'a coherent artistic policy', which will co-ordinate the different limbs of the South Bank. Now he comes to mention it, this seems a pretty obvious scheme, yet either no one thought of it before or it took a revolution to sweep away obstructive in- vested interests. Probably the latter. One Possible problem is that he does not actually have any jurisdiction over the National Theatre or the National Film Theatre, though from the beginning of 1987 he will have a say in the plans for the Hayward Gallery. To realise his dream of coherence he will need to be a skilled diplomat; but the wind is blowing in his favour at the moment. Suddenly everyone seems dissatisfied with the principle that each hall, gallery, and theatre on the South Bank should be free to experiment as they please, even though as little as a year ago this very idea of themes, policies and consultations was treated with consider- able suspicion. Of course there has been a revolution, we all know about that. What I should like to have explained is whether the upshot in this case has been specifically right-wing. What is left-wing about auton- omous concrete boxes, and right-wing about planned festivals? I agree that the GLC's idea of filling the foyer of the Festival Hall with cafés and craft shops was a highbrow popular move, if the oxymoron he allowed, but I doubt that the new board intends to sweep these away. The most immediate and noticeable Cnange that will be made involves the Physical appearance of the South Bank. Initially the concrete will be brightened up With banners and new lighting, and some of those pock-marked walkways will be re- placed by 'attractively landscaped areas'. Eventually, and symbolically, the intention is to put a roof over the open space between the Royal Festival Hall, the QEH and the Purcell Room, the Hayward Gal- lery and the NFT 'providing a completely enclosed environment from the RFH to Waterloo Bridge'. The sainted walkways would then become internal floors which could be carpeted (not, I trust, with the Open University symbols that have repro- duced themselves all over the existing carpet) and the concrete painted. Much of this newly housed area 'would then be available for small shops, bars and res- taurants'. Inside the halls themselves the plan is to make the QEH less like a tunnel by bringing the stage forward for dance and music-theatre (Snowman gave the Play of Daniel as an example of the kind of event he had in mind) and by putting seats behind it. In the Purcell Room his inten- tion is to build up a young, fringe-style audience where debut recitals will rub shoulders with avant-garde experiment and even jazz concerts. There is the possibility of having no stage and no seating.
But the really heady part of the planning is the tendency towards the Great Interna- tional Event, which will not only involve all the South Bank facilities but will also co-ordinate with foreign centres. Snow- man's powers of diplomacy are evidently being put to the widest use. Private spon- sorship is being sought by arts centres in
Berlin, Paris and Vienna, as well as Lon- don, in order to put together the promised Brahms-Schoenberg Festival for the 1988- 89 season. The initial run of very expensive large-scale works, like Messiaen's Saint Francis or Holliger's The Seasons, will in future immediately include a performance in London after their world premieres in, for instance, Metz or Strasbourg, so that they will not have to be rehearsed up from scratch at great and renewed cost. Every year there will be a series called 'Perspec- tives', for which new plays will be commis- sioned, experimental films shown, art ex- hibitions imported. Europe is pulling together.
I posed a few modest questions about 16th-century music in all this, which were deftly handled by reference to Monteverdi in the new-look QEH and the inclusion in the 1989 South Bank Summer Music of the work of Leonhardt and Kuij ken. I waived the technicality that none of this has anything to do with the Renaissance in reflecting that the South Bank is just not the place for it, though I suspect that given the chance Snowman would have con- vinced me that it was. All this talk of 1988 and 1989, the first years that the new board has a free hand, led me to ask whether Snowman expects still to be there, to enjoy the fruits of his work after the next election. He looked pensive and spoke of doing the job of the moment as well as possible.
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