Southbank Sinfonia at St John's Smith Square

Southbank Sinfonia has been providing an annual intake of orchestral fellows with an ever-widening range of training and performance opportunities for nearly two decades from a base at St John’s Waterloo. The 33-strong orchestra, however, is now moving its headquarters to St John’s Smith Square following a merger between the two organisations as a single charity, Southbank Sinfonia at St John’s Smith Square.

The association between Southbank Sinfonia and the left bank venue is not a new one. The orchestra held their official launch concert there in November 2002, but the orchestra had visited even before then.

‘We found our first lot of players quite early,’ recalls SBS founder music director and principal conductor, Simon Over, an organist who was then at the end of ten years as music director at St Margaret’s Westminster. ‘I was doing a set of recitals at Smith Square with Malcolm Martineau. Each one had two composers and two singers and the last one was going to be Della Jones singing Mozart and Sally Matthews singing Strauss. Malcolm said: why don’t you get your orchestra together early and make it orchestral song?’

St John’s has of course regularly hosted orchestral concert series and touring orchestras but the new venture amounts to an unprecedented interdependence between the venue and a single performing organisation, with the space turned over to Southbank Sinfonia for around 120 days a year.

‘What excited me when we first started talking was the opportunity for a creative skeleton, almost, to the venue’s existence,’ says Heason. ‘The building – the bricks and mortar – is fabulous, but it is bricks and mortar: they don’t do anything, apart from house whatever happens within them. In the nine years I’ve been here we’ve had some fantastic projects, some great concerts and great artists coming in, but by the nature of that sort of programme it has been a night of something brilliant or a week of something brilliant. What this creates is an embedded community of creativity from which everything else can start to grow and blossom and influence.’

Over says the idea came from his own thoughts about his orchestra’s future. ‘We were talking with Clive Gillinson at Carnegie Hall, because he knows a lot about buildings and orchestras, and orchestras in buildings. He was saying that one plus one equals more. It’s not two or three or four; the sky’s the limit. Southbank Sinfonia is approaching its 20th anniversary and has been lodging at St John’s Waterloo for all of that time. As the founder I always thought I could die a happy man if we had somewhere that was our home. I would feel it had some longevity if it had bricks and mortar.’

The new arrangement, which, Heason reveals, was instigated by a phone call one Sunday afternoon from a Southbank Sinfonia trustee, leaves plenty of time for St John’s to continue programming events.

‘I hope that the audience won’t be impacted by any change,’ he says. ‘I hope they will benefit from the changes. They will notice things, of course. They’ll notice, I hope, that it’s busier. Not that it wasn’t busy before; but it will be busier, inevitably, by having a big chunk of rehearsal and performance additional to what was in the diary last year or the year before. And many of those performances will be at different times or in different formats or presented in different ways. But equally, if your love is lunchtime organ recitals, there will still be lunchtime organ recitals.’

Other familiar events, such as the baroque, Christmas and Holy Week festivals, will also continue. The venue will also continue to represent many different strands of the capital’s and the country’s musical activity, a feature of St Johns’s offer that had long captured Over’s interest.

‘I’ve been fascinated by the way it has attracted the great and the good, performing in chamber and orchestral and choral music, but it has also given space for schools to do their London gig. It has been a really interesting place for music to be made by people in all different ways and all different levels. And Southbank is interested in working with people at all different levels as well.’

He has an eye on the potential of the building itself, which comes with various appealing architectural features, and he touches on several of these during our conversation. He wonders, for instance, about the potential in the church’s exterior space, with its porticos atop broad flights of steps. Is there scope to rethink the way the crypt is used, perhaps moving its current hospitality function elsewhere on the site? What about removing the stage altogether and making more flexible use of the striking chequerboard floor, and the arena formed by the currently underused gallery?

Heason talks positively about the prospect of investing in the building’s development as a flexible, more accessible facility – although he notes that as a high-ceilinged open space without fixed seats, the venue was able to return to performances under pandemic restrictions quicker than most last summer. That prospect will surely be bolstered by the presence of an orchestra whose work has increasingly looked at making more theatrical use of venue space. Recent productions at the Round Chapel in Hackney, in particular, have included highly choreographed concerts utilising a galleried church interior to dramatic effect.

‘We also do a lot of groundbreaking work on how you should perform in the 21st century,’ explains Over. ‘Do you sit in the same formation? Do you wear the same clothes? We’ve done blindfolded concerts, concerts where we’ve opened the orchestra out and people have walked in between them – all kinds of different ways of exploring contemporary music-making with that we have inherited and that which is new.’

Over is keen to stress that St John’s Waterloo served them well, and that they are not in any case cutting ties completely with what is, after all, a working church with community responsibilities. They plan to keep an office there to develop work with the orchestra’s alumni network as well as continuing to rehearse and perform there.

‘Our roots are absolutely there. Not only have we worked in all of the three halls of the Southbank Centre, but we’ve had a particularly productive relationship with the National Theatre and done stuff in the Olivier and the Lyttelton, and the BFI, and the Young Vic down the road. And we’ve done things with the Coin Street development and in Lambeth. So we have a very warm feeling about the place.’

For SJSS, it is an opportunity to go further than laying on a beautiful setting for incoming artists but to generate and send out its own work. The two men also share an aspiration to make the venue more of a signposted landmark, part of a cultural corridor stretching along the Thames from Tate Britain, through Westminster and up Whitehall to Trafalgar Square and the national galleries there.

‘There are all kinds of fascinating stories,’ says Heason. ‘Purcell was born 200 metres away, lived all his life there – the house has been rebuilt now but we know where it is. So there’s lots of things we can animate in the journey of someone who wants to explore the area.’