Revamped concert hall reminds lazy Londoners what they’re missing
Fairfield Halls Gala opening concerts, Croydon
Croydon has always boasted that it has the best concert hall in London. Orchestras love to play there because the sound is so good. The problem for the hall ever since it opened in 1962 is that those in the centre of the city have always been too lazy, or too posh, to take a 17-minute train journey to enjoy it. So the hall found a different role for itself; becoming the beating heart of this teeming borough of 400,000 souls by embracing all the arts, high and low. You could see the London Mozart Players (the hall’s resident orchestra since 1989) one day, and Morecambe and Wise or Petula Clark the next.
In recent years the hall had fallen on hard times, but the borough council decided to take it in hand. With the aid of a developer they gave it a thorough overhaul and added two new studio spaces, all at a cost of £41million (£11million over budget). On Wednesday night it reopened with a grand gala concert in the main hall, named after the British piano manufacturer Phoenix which has supplied all the pianos in the complex. It was given by the resident orchestra, with a programme that struck just the right note of jubilant celebration – but with some moments of deep feeling at its heart. These came from soprano Elizabeth Watts, who stood in at 24 hours’ notice for the indisposed Louise Alder to sing two Mozart arias. She struck a lovely note of tender intimacy in Zeffiretti, lusinghieri, with beautiful floating head tones that stilled the packed hall, and in Ch’io mi scordi di te? showed she can summon a startlingly impassioned tone of heartbreak and despair.
Before this came the pert, neoclassical wit of Prokofiev’s Classical Symphony, conducted by Howard Shelley in a performance which caught the music’s balletic grace and also its comedy – the Ugly Sisters in Prokofiev’s ballet Cinderella didn’t seem far away. Then came a brand-new fanfare from Alex Woolf, conducted by Hilary Davan Wetton, which combined jubilation with an enjoyable sense of wide-open spaces. The performance of Beethoven’s Seventh Symphony was less of a joy, as Gérard Korsten (conducting the London Mozart Players) focused on detail rather than the music’s overall arch, which made it seem hectic and hard-driven. But goodness, that detail certainly shone out, in the hall’s crystal-clear acoustic.
In all it was a rousing reopening for a venue clearly determined to serve every taste, within its community and further afield. Let’s hope it thrives. Hear this concert on BBC Radio 3 on Oct 4 at 7.30pm, and for 30 days thereafter on BBC Sounds