Adams packs a punch in the car park
Bold Tendencies Multi-storey Car Park, Peckham
Level 8 of a brutalist concrete London car park straight out of
A Clockwork Orange wouldn’t be anyone’s first choice for a classical orchestral venue. But here we were in large numbers, on a hot afternoon of the bank holiday weekend, courtesy of the BBC Proms outreach programme, to hear a Bach Prelude, a new choral work and John Adams’s epic Harmonielehre.
Behind it all was the Multi-story Orchestra, an outfit established in 2011 to take music to unfamiliar venues. An abandoned supermarket facility in “vibrant” Peckham with a celebrated vodka bar on its flat roof and a reputation for hosting funky arts events has become its headquarters and although the acoustics of Level 8 are less than ideal – not least because of exposure to passing trains and blaring sirens – the empty expanse does have resonance and atmosphere.
It also draws an audience far younger and more “diverse” than the one that now inhabits the Royal Albert Hall – and for that alone, this 70-minute concert, ably compèred by Tom Service, was exhilarating.
I’m baffled, however, by the decision to start with Granville Bantock’s soupy arrangement of Bach’s chorale prelude Sleepers,
awake (Wachet auf), which had the opposite effect to that urged by its title and reduced the wind and brass counterpoint to mush.
More engaging was I am I say, a short new piece on ecological themes composed collaboratively by the orchestra’s co-founder Kate Whitley for the newly formed Multistory Youth Choir, largely made up of primary schoolchildren from the Peckham area. They sang a mellifluous chant lamenting the perils facing our planet with gusto and precision, bolstered by professionals Ruby Hughes and Michael Sumuel.
But the meat of the concert was a strong performance of one of John Adams’s most substantial and ambitious orchestral works.
Harmonielehre has established itself as one of the modern classics of American music and its cosmic ambition – referencing late Romantic masters such as Wagner and Mahler – still packs a terrific punch.
From its thunderously assertive opening to the suppressed restless anguish of its central section and the free-floating grace in its final movement, the tension did not falter, and whatever Christopher Stark’s conducting failed to enforce in terms of strict ensemble it more than made up in energy, imagination and colour.