Classic Mixtape: Takeover Live Review – One Queue After One at Mars Orchestra Festival | classical music

‘h“Hear music in different ways in our acquisition across locations,” ran a marketing blurb. “You can choose to listen again, skip and move on to another orchestra or pause to catch up with friends at one of our bars.” The idea is to create a live mixtape in which the six world-class orchestras based at the Southbank Center will play a short set, repeated throughout the evening, with the audience free to wander between them. The on-site summer dance takeover was imaginative and engaging. Why not do the same for classical music?

It started at the Royal Festival Hall, where the London Philharmonic Orchestra played “Da Da Da Dome” from Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony. Indeed, the opening movement was fast and the da da da dum was present and correct. Vogue Williams, media personality, model and host of Send Nudes: Body SOS, welcomed us to the event. “It wasn’t unbelievable,” she gushed after the opening six minutes of movement. “You must be devastated,” she told the orchestra, which routinely performed 90-minute Mahler symphonies and four-hour operas, but conductor Ed Gardner smiled bravely and moved into a short medley of Howard Shore’s Lord of the Rings film music.

This was followed by the finale of Tchaikovsky’s Fourth Symphony, whose mood swings had no separate musical meaning from the rest of the work. However, LPO played the game at full speed and flawlessly.

The audience was then free to choose one of the other four orchestras (actually, small groups of musicians from each) playing short sets in much smaller spaces on the Southbank. Each set was repeated three times over the next 75 minutes, which means that in theory you could catch most of the music on display, but no one had done the math or envisioned how the audience would move through the set? The Royal Festival Hall (which seats 2,700 people) was full. Throw that many people at once into four smaller spaces, whose combined capacity doesn’t come close to being able to handle such a crowd, and you’ll inevitably leave much of your audience stuck in bottlenecks. Communicating with friends often took place in queues, and often included the question: “Have you actually been able to hear anything yet?”

When I did, the results were mixed. Chinki members! The small orchestra was arranged around the Clore Ballroom on individual platforms like exhibits in a gallery, with Yshani Perinpanayagam gamely keeping its disparate forces together to perform Margaret Bonds’ moving Montgomery Variations as the audience wandered between the players. Some of the young artists looked visibly uncomfortable; A more experienced orchestra and a less complex piece would certainly be a happier choice here.

In the basement below the Queen Elizabeth Hall, a group of musicians from London’s Sinfonietta performed three excerpts from works by Steve Reich. Those who were lucky enough to be there found the industrial space lit up like a nightclub, and in what seemed rather polite, Reich’s music still weaving its hypnotic magic.

Meanwhile, in the Purcell Room (capacity of about 300), players from the Aurora Orchestra were on a musical adventure inspired, it seemed, by Gustav and Alma Mahler’s time in the Alps. The blurb was that audience members were “free to move between the stages as they pleased,” but that was easier said than done: only the most dedicated could see the musical heights Aurora had reached. However, in the lobby, you can enjoy a brass and percussion band from the Enlightenment Orchestra dressed in leather trousers, Alpine hats and dirndls (and yes, with 19th century Bavarian instruments) performing a range of musical sounds and having a good time using beer mugs as percussion instruments and proving that it is definitely a game for a laugh.

The Barbican’s Sound Unbound festival showed that classical music in bite-sized segments with an audience free to explore can work incredibly well. There, the music spread to 19 venues throughout the weekend. Here, surprisingly, the Centre’s second hall, the Queen Elizabeth Hall (which seats around 900), was not used as a performance space, and there were no duos, trios, quartets or quintets in the vast public spaces on any of the Royal Festival Hall’s six floors. The audience profile was noticeably younger and more mixed than the usual classical one, but they were not well served by unambitious programming and poor planning.

When everyone was turned back towards the Royal Festival Hall to hear the finale – the Philharmonia performing two movements from Holst’s Planetary and Star Wars theme, I decided that less was definitely more and escaped this depressing vision of the future of classical music.