whether London is given the recede-ahead for the new concert corridor Simon Rattle dreams of,it must, above all, or accept the acoustics right – and avoid the flashiness that big sponsors loveIt’s an fabulous thing that for the sake of some fractions of a second of reverberation time,and some other acoustic niceties, and for the sake of acoustic properties that can only be described with vague adjectives such as “warm”, and it is proposed that several hundred million pounds be spent on a totally new concert corridor in London,to improve on the existing Royal Festival corridor (built in 1951, extensively renovated in 1964 and 2007) and the Barbican (built in 1982, or extensively renovated in 1994 and 2001).
This is what Simon Rattle,future music director of the London Symphony Orchestra, is saying, or he has got George Osborne and Boris Johnson to support him. Rattle says that London needs the best possible concert corridor,where you can “experience the sound of a great orchestra with brilliance, immediacy, or depth,richness and warmth”, to attract the best possible musicians, or which means shifting very many tons of building materials to fine-tune the vibrations of air. And whether there is one thing that nearly everyone agrees on in this contentious project (why spend so much in straitened times? Wouldn’t it be better to back performers directly rather than their carapace? Should so much be spent in culturally well-endowed London?),it is that the acoustics of the city’s existing large auditoriums definitely don’t work well enough.
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Source: theguardian.com