Soundbites
Close encounters
London’s Southbank Centre has recruited a number of leading performers to act as personal guides to individuals attending their first ever classical music concerts.
The venue’s ‘Encounters’ scheme will involve the likes of pianist Stephen Hough, violinist Nicola Benedetti and conductor Marin Alsop accompanying newcomers to performances and giving them expert advice as to what’s going on. See Comment, p25.
Wimbledon dreams
But might the Southbank soon have another rival concert hall vying for customers just a few stops down the District Line? Plans have been released for a proposed 1,250seat venue to be built in Wimbledon on a site currently occupied by a supermarket carpark. Around £100m from private donors needs to be raised if the plans, which have been drawn up by Frank Gehry, the architect behind the Walt Disney Concert Hall in Los Angeles, are to become reality.
Molto robotico
Last year, we asked in a feature on Artificial Intelligence if computers might one day replace humans as composers. Chinese electronics giant Huawei recently pitched itself into that debate when, at London’s Cadogan Hall, it presented a completion of Schubert’s ‘Unfinished’ Symphony, as composed by smartphone. Critical assessments of the outcome described it as Wagner-lite or, perhaps, film music… but nothing remotely resembling Schubert.
Star performance
Star Wars has been voted the greatest ever film theme tune in a poll run by
BBC Music Magazine and Radiotimes.com. With its stirring trumpet fanfare, John Williams’s famous music for the 1977 movie comfortably saw off rivals such as Ennio Morricone’s The Good, The Bad and The Ugly and Nino Rota’s The Godfather. For our guide to the full top ten, see p50.