The death of the concert hall
This Saturday I will be joining 100 musicians in Peckham Rye Multi-Storey Car Park to perform the American composer John Adams’s 20th-century minimalist masterpiece, Harmonielehre. The TROSP (The Rite of Spring Project) Orchestra, conducted by Christopher Stark, is a collective drawn from the UK’s music colleges, and Oxford and Cambridge Universities, while the performance itself comes as part of a summer series run by Bold Tendencies – a non-profit sculpture project that uses the car park for exhibitions. Last year the disused car park provided a space for the orchestra to perform Stravinsky’s seminal work The Rite of Spring, with the acoustics of the low concrete ceiling projecting the dissonant, fragmented roar across the London skyline. In a performance to over 1,400 people, TROSP took a defiant sledgehammer to the high art/low art binary.