Music
Period piece
Peter Phillips
0 ne forgets how dreary the Festival Hall is. Promenaders sold on the delights of the Albert Hall, determined opera buffs, lovers of church concerts and followers of the London Symphony Orchestra may find, like me, that the RFH doesn't feature much in their scheme of things. It featured In mine the other evening because I wished to hear the Suisse Romande Orchestra on their first-ever tour of England, and thought the much-trailed Gala Event the obvious opportunity to do so. Their playing !vas entirely competent if not particularly individual — the same could be said of so many first-rate orchestras around the world at the moment — but the concert was ren- dered joyless from the outset by its circum- stances.
A lot of time has been spent since the abolition of the GLC and the inauguration of the South Bank Centre on trying to find ways of disguising the concrete outside of the buildings. Some of the darker corners have been painted white, I noticed; but grander plans for masking the façade in artful ways have so far proved to be too expensive. In fact the judicious placing of Plants, benches, sculpture and white paint has made the approach to the RFH rela- tively tolerable. The real problem is the interior of the concert hall itself, which in Its design and furnishing is so far out of keeping with contemporary taste that it depresses the listener before the music has even begun; at which point the famously vacant acoustics take over and deepen his mood. The icing on the cake on this partic- ular occasion was that the audience was largely invited, since the Suisse Romande Was helping Switzerland to celebrate being 700: a collection of dignitaries disinclined, in their smart costumes, to fight against the appalling formality which large halls of this kind promote. Albert Roussel's Bacchus et
Ariane (Suite No. 2), which ended the recital and is foot-tapping music if it is any- thing at all, never stood a chance.
It will be interesting to read how Bridget Cherry treats Nikolaus Pevsner's original 1951 appraisal of the RFH in her newly edited London volumes of the Buildings of England series. At the time of its erection Pevsner was clearly excited by the building, commending the 'management of inner space' in the staircases and promenades, though his enthusiasm was tempered in the concert hall itself by the restless breaking up of the surfaces and the excessive variety of the decorative motifs. He ultimately withheld his censure of these details because he accepted that acoustics are improved by not having smooth surfaces, and the overall scheme seemed to him to be an 'indication of that reaction against the straightness and utilitarianism of 1930 which is so characteristic of 1950'. Forty years later we have a different view of the aesthetics of decoration and much too much experience of flawed acoustics. To my Nineties eye the extensive use of light woods (sycamore in the orchestral canopy) looks insubstantial, even cheap, taking its place in a colour scheme which lacks any incisive, characterful accents. The famous carpet, with its reference to the shape of contemporary television sets in its design, is a period piece which should be preserved somewhere safer. As for the acoustics, I quizzed a senior orchestral player sitting near me how he had reacted to performing in the hall, at which he raised an eyebrow and invited me to play the trumpet solos in Mahler's Seventh Symphony when you can't hear anything that's going on around you. 'It seems like a very long piece,' he concluded. I knew what he was trying to say.
One day the Festival Hall will be admired, rightly, as a leading example of post-war architecture in Britain, and possi- bly even in Europe. The original fittings, the quirky period chairs and tables in the restaurants (illustrated in Pevsner) will be restored or remade, visitors will thrill to the sensations of experiencing a past age. That lies in the future, for few people are capti- vated by the spirit of the Fifties just now (and it is hard to believe that they ever will be, though the law of averages suggests they will). Therefore I do not advocate here, as some do, that the whole place should be demolished; but I do believe that the custodians of the Hall have an intractable problem which merits our understanding. In fact, they might the more quickly appeal to everyone's better nature if they refrained from inviting the great orchestras of the world to make their rare appearances in the RFH. The mauling the Suisse Romande got from the London press must have upset them, and they didn't entirely deserve it.
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