The idea seemed promising: six world-class orchestras, a single evening, and the audience free to move from one stage to another, like a live "mixtape" of classical music.
Southbank Centre promoted the Classical Mixtape: A Live Takeover event as a new way to experience music – listen, pause, change orchestra, meet friends. But what sounded innovative on paper turned into a series of endless queues and uninspired programming.
The evening began at the Royal Festival Hall with the London Philharmonic Orchestra and the famous “ta-ta-ta-taaa” notes of Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony. The performance was energetic and accurate, even though it was limited to the first movement. Presenter Vogue Williams declared the moment “extraordinary,” while conductor Ed Gardner quickly moved on to a medley of music from Lord of the Rings and the finale of Tchaikovsky’s Fourth Symphony – powerful in its interpretation, but disconnected from the musical context of the work.
After that, the audience was invited to disperse to four much smaller spaces, where groups of musicians from other orchestras repeated short sets over the course of 75 minutes. In theory, everything seemed well-calculated. In reality, it wasn’t. Pulling about 2,700 people out of the main hall at once and directing them into the limited-capacity spaces was a sure recipe for chaos. Meetings with friends mostly took place in lines, often accompanied by the ironic question: “Did you manage to hear anything?”
Even when you managed to get in, the experience was uneven. In the Clore Ballroom, members of the Chineke! Junior Orchestra were arranged like museum exhibits, each on their own podium, performing Margaret Bonds’ Montgomery Variations. The idea was interesting, but some of the young musicians seemed uncomfortable, and the piece required more focus than constant audience movement.
Under the Queen Elizabeth Hall, musicians from the London Sinfonietta played pieces by Steve Reich in an industrial, nightclub-lit setting. Those lucky enough to get in still experienced the hypnotic magic of Reich's music, even if the performance was somewhat subdued.
In the Purcell Room, with a capacity of about 300 seats, the Aurora Orchestra offered a musical journey inspired by Mahler’s time in the Alps. But entry was so difficult that only the most persistent managed to hear it. In contrast, in the lobby, a brass band from the Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment, dressed in alpine costumes, entertained the audience with a medley from The Sound of Music, even using beer glasses as instruments – a rare moment of spontaneous joy.
Examples such as the Barbican’s Sound Unbound festival have shown that classical music in short, free-flowing formats can work brilliantly. But there the music was spread across 19 venues over an entire weekend. At the Southbank, surprisingly, the Queen Elizabeth Hall was not used as a main stage at all, and there was a lack of smaller formats – duos, trios or quartets – in the larger public spaces. Although the audience was noticeably younger and more diverse than usual, it was disappointed by the lackluster programming and poor planning.
The finale, with the Philharmonia Orchestra playing two movements from Holst's The Planets and the Star Wars theme, found me already convinced that "less is more." I left early, hoping that this was not the vision of the future for classical music. /GazetaExpress/
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