The Long View | If the City won't build London a new hall, someone else must

So the Centre for Music is no longer. London must muddle on. There will be no ‘building back better’ in classical music. Instead there will be more survival, more compromise, and more money poured into another facelift for the faceless Barbican Centre. What’s the betting they’ll end up spending more on it than the £28 million dished-out recently for a beautiful, statement concert hall in the Latvian town of Liepāja?

Some of my wiser, more experience colleagues have expressed relief that the project has met its end. I was never a great fan of the actual plans for the LSO’s new hall, but I respectfully disagree. Yes, there are tough times coming post-pandemic and a glitzy building project is not at the top of anybody’s list of priorities. But any new concert hall necessitates a long-term build that would likely take far more than a decade to realise. The way things are going, the nightmare of 2020 would have been a distant memory before the hoardings even went up.

It’s also an investment – one we know, courtesy of similar projects around the world, will pay off. And in more ways than one. For the first decade in operation, ticket income will likely soar. Tens of thousands will have their ears and eyes opened to orchestral music by virtue of architectural curiosity alone. The dividend to the sector will spread to other venues and even stretch beyond the box office. For all its disdain for the arts, we have a government inclined to spend on capital building projects led by a Prime Minister apparently interested in both orchestral music and statement architecture.

Okay, there’s no private money. But there’s never any private money, until some appears. Somehow the UK has managed to build a handful of private opera houses in the last few years while individuals who support the arts have found tens of millions down the back of the sofa to buy Hockneys. It’s a crass reality, but there’s the same number of rich philanthropists wanting to secure their legacy now as there was in January 2020.

As for creative figureheads, the notion that the project needed a Simon Rattle to push it through is twaddle. Paris didn’t need a Rattle figure to build three spectacular new orchestra-size concert halls in the space of four years from 2013 (all in the wake of a financial crash). It just took pragmatism, pride and a little bit of long-term thinking. It also took confidence. And while confidence is precisely what the sector has in short supply right now, it’s also exactly what will get us through the challenge of the coming years.

From a European perspective, a London saying goodbye to three leading conductors needs to prove itself if it wants to retain its orchestral crown. Remaining committed to some sort of significant new venue for orchestral music would prove the capital means business. It doesn’t have to be the Centre for Music. It could be a cheaper hall in a better location with a more spectacular profile – the sort that would get pulses racing far beyond the Square Mile. There were designs for such a building, in a tourist-friendly location on the Thames, tabled before the Centre for Music got traction a few years ago.  

‘Musicians make music, not halls,’ Fiona Maddocks perceptively wrote in The Observer last weekend. But a worthy concert hall is like the worthy instrument a good musician needs. It will transform day-to-day life for the orchestras that occupy it and undoubtedly sharpen their playing. More importantly, it will alter the place of classical music in the civic and physical profile of the city, helping to protect it in the long-term. It has the potential to generate entirely new audiences – like the new hall in Copenhagen to which the Centre for Music design bore a striking resemblance – and have a huge psychoacoustic effect on the listening experience of existing ones. Boy do they deserve it.

Yes, we will be thinking more locally in future, which is precisely why it’s a failure of imagination to believe an orchestral concert hall fit for London is somehow an indulgence. There is a long list of dour metropolises in the north of Europe, with Lutheran self-denial in their DNA, whose new concert halls suggest otherwise. As their occupying musicians know: the question isn’t so much whether the sector can afford to build such a hall, as whether it can afford not to.