'First Night' Gala Concert
Royal Festival Hall, London SE1
Attending the gala concert to mark the reopening of the Royal Festival Hall was like going to a wedding where, instead of a happy couple, there was one happy building - open, clear and expansive after its £115 million overhaul. It has been a subtle but comprehensive revolution: an open space (in which less is more) and a liberation of river views.
On Monday night the hall was lit in bold Yves Klein-blue stripes, vases were stuffed with arum lilies and white flowers too vast in circumference to seem real. The openness of the space contributed to the mood of the evening: relaxed yet celebratory. As I strolled about I thought of the Polish proverb: 'Everything changes and nothing changes'. This is an example of renovation (the building has been closed for two years) as homage. The 1951 Festival of Britain design (so radical at the time with all its concrete and glass) has been respected throughout yet covertly improved. You even continue to get the grey-carpet treatment,for which many concert-goers apparently feel keen affection. (A puzzled footnote: when I inspected the rewoven carpet, as I felt duty-bound to do, it looked already worn and slightly stained in places - perhaps the work of a quarter of a million pairs of feet during last weekend's free celebrations?)
The concert kicked off with conventional words of welcome from South Bank Centre chairman Lord Hollick and later from artistic director Jude Kelly, but the music had more surprising things to say. Julian Anderson's tremendous opening piece, Alleluia, based on a 10th-century Latin hymn to creation and commissioned for the occasion, showed how exaltation is first cousin to lament. A bell tolled through the piece (never seek to ask for whom) but then became absorbed into wild glorying. Most remarkable of all was the moment when the choir (the London Philharmonic) was in uproar, unaccompanied by any instrument, each voice singing at its own speed, like a newly released soul testing its freedom.
The four resident orchestras, the London Philharmonic, Philharmonia Orchestra, the London Sinfonietta and Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment, did the new hall proud. And the acoustic, masterminded by Larry Kirkegaard, is - at least to my untutored ear - perfection. The bass notes, once swallowed alive by the legendary wood panelling, are now finely discernible. And most thrilling of all are the moments of distance and closeness together. The piece that best demonstrated this was Charles Ives's The Unanswered Question, performed in low light. The sound seemed to grow out of a past and yet to be, at the same time, an intimate haunting. From the sides of the stalls, like musical ushers, the trumpeters blew their questions across the space.
I was diverted by what followed: Harrison Birtwistle's specially commissioned reworking of his 1986 piece Cortege. In it, 14 solo instrumentalists upstaged one another in a serious version of musical chairs. There was a trumpeter whose solo was like a fight for life, a violinist pressingly keen to have her say, a nimble oboist and other idiosyncratic, rivalrous individuals locked into this musical power struggle. I liked the witty persistence of the piece and its theatricality.
The programme was nothing if not catholic. And Gyorgy Ligeti's Atmospheres (1960) marked another mood shift. If Stravinsky's Firebird was in fine form during the first part of the concert, this piece - launching the third - was a hive of sound, like a million insects taking wing. It was a curious decision to let this piece lead, without pause, into the fourth movement of Beethoven's ninth symphony. But the 'Ode to Joy' was none the less a high spot - a general outbreak of happiness with the fiddlers leaning back, as if in the presence of a fair and favourable wind. The hall's white boxes, on high, looked like the hubs of fancy cars or ocean-going ships.
Ravel's Bolero made a festive finale. Badly played, it can be tedious - all that gypsy suspense, like a promised bull fight in which matador and bull fail the waiting crowd. But all the orchestras together, conducted by the wonderful Marin Alsop, played with such panache that even those inclined to turn their noses up at the piece found it in their hearts and hands to cheer. And this Bolero led to a climax: the evening's final champagne toast in the 'ballroom'.
In 1949 Clement Attlee dug a hole for the Royal Festival Hall's foundation stone and expressed his hope that the concert hall would 'long endure for the pleasure and refreshment of the soul to generations of Londoners as yet unborn'. A new version of that same hope will have been felt - by all generations - as chief executive Michael Lynch proposed his toast to the past, present and future of the place.
