Blow up the opera houses, said Pierre Boulez, featured composer at this year’s Aldeburgh Festival. Should we blow up concert halls too? Roger Wright, the Festival’s director, wouldn’t go that far. But he’s aware that the antiseptic purity of the concert hall doesn’t set the heart racing, and is keen to take some of the Festival’s musicmaking into unusual spaces.
Aldeburgh is blessed with plenty of them. There’s the beach, for a start, the setting for Britten’s Peter Grimes two years ago. There are lovely old churches, such as the one at Blythburgh, and the Pumphouse. But not until this year did any festival director conceive the mad notion that a car park in Ipswich might be just the ticket for an orchestral concert.
Wright was inspired by the example of the Multi-Story Orchestra, created by a group of young musicians to give a summer season each year at Peckham Rye car park in South London. The aim was to tempt a new audience to classical music, among people who wouldn’t normally go near the Barbican or South Bank – and it worked.
It worked in Ipswich too, as Sunday’s concert from the orchestra in Suffolk County Council’s car park proved. Their park is better appointed than the one in Peckham – painted metal instead of rain-blotched concrete – and the traffic noises much less intrusive. The crowd was equally good, though rather than young metropolitan sophisticates it was weighted towards doting parents. They were there to see children from three Ipswich schools perform alongside the orchestra and Cantabile Youth Choir in a new piece by Kate Whitley, one of Multi-Story’s founders.
The temptation for a composer in these challenging circumstances would be to write a straightforwardly cheerful number, with a simple melody for the children, and thumping beat. In her setting of a poem by Holly McNish, Whitley pulled off the remarkable feat of composing something eminently practical, but with a genuine emotional gravity. It had a clear pulse, allied to a fluttering agitation in the harmony, which beautifully caught the poem’s feeling of “kissing the joy as it flies”.
Alongside the new piece were Beethoven’s overture the Creatures of Prometheus, and Aaron Copland’s ballet
Appalachian Spring, both cleverly shaped by conductor Christopher Stark to emphasise their high points, without sacrificing the music’s subtlety.