Sir Simon Rattle has criticised his own orchestra’s Barbican concert hall, saying it is too cramped to put on much of the music he would like to perform there.
The conductor, who announced his first programme as principal conductor of the London Symphony Orchestra yesterday, said that the Barbican was so small that if musicians were animals there would be an intervention by the RSPCA.
He said there were some pieces that the orchestra played at the venue in the City of London “which we probably shouldn’t for health and safety reasons” because of the noise.
For large-scale pieces, musicians are not only too close to one another but there is not enough space overhead for the sound to disperse, he said.
“It’s very clear that we can do a lot of wonderful work in the Barbican but it’s also clear that there is about 20 per cent of the repertoire that will not work there,” he said.
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Sir Simon, who will officially begin in September despite not being due to leave the Berlin Philharmonic until the summer of 2018, said that “a lot of the big masterpieces of the last 50 years” were not suitable for the Barbican. He cited Richard Strauss’s Alpine symphony and Hans Werner Henze’s Raft of the Medusa as being better suited to venues such as the Albert Hall.
“If you can imagine the amount of sound that comes out of a small stage with an orchestra crammed on too close to each other, it may be fun to listen to the Alpine symphony in the Barbican but I don’t think the RSPCA, if they were dealing with the orchestra, would allow it,” he said.
“The Barbican is a peculiarly difficult place to programme choral work as the designers simply forgot to put any space for a chorus. Obviously, the stage was beautifully designed for a certain size of orchestra, but not designed for a very large orchestra . . . Anything you want to do that is theatrical is a problem [because of restricted views]. This is part of the reason why we will need a different kind of home.”
Sir Simon has been a champion of a project to build a £278 million centre for music in the City of London. The plan almost collapsed last year when the government withdrew £2.5 million, but it has since been rescued by funding from the Corporation of London.
The conductor, who has been at the Berlin Philharmonic since 2002, suggested that the lack of government support for the building meant that the £278 million cost may be “too high”.
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He said the government’s withdrawal was “a blessing and a curse” because he no longer had to justify why the money would not be better spent on schools and hospitals. “The minute you feel that this could have been spent . . . on something else, this is a very difficult area. Anyone with half a brain is going to agree with that — even a conductor.”
Season highlights include Karlheinz Stockhausen’s Gruppen in Tate Modern’s turbine hall and Half Six Fix concerts at the Barbican. Sir Simon promised to begin every season with a new work from a British composer, starting with a piece by Helen Grime.
Analysis
Simon Rattle is not the first conductor to complain that a chunk of the classical repertoire cannot be performed in the Barbican (Richard Morrison writes).
In 1982, when the hall opened, I recall Claudio Abbado — then the London Symphony Orchestra’s principal conductor — going nuclear when he realised the limitations. “Where does the choir go? Why no organ? How can I conduct Mahler here?”
Thirty-five years on, little has changed. The platform is cramped, meaning that brass players sit right behind the woodwind and the back desks of strings. The onslaught of decibels is, at best, oppressive for the players; at worst, medically damaging.
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For players and a conductor out to compete with the best, it’s simply not fit for purpose.