Near-empty opening week at London’s Borough of Culture
NewsThe long running calamity of Croydon’s restored Fairfield Halls took another dive last night for the pre-opening concert marking the suburb’s designation as London’s Borough of Culture.
The visiting orchestra was the Swedish Philharmonia with conductor Jaime MartÃn.
The hall was two-thirds empty.
Read a live report here from Inside Croydon.
If half the programme is a Sibelius symphony, you have to be a fan of Sibelius.
The excellent GAVLE orchestra (known to cd collectors for rare music) deserve better but even in affluent Guildford the hall was far from full and the concert series is more established: Croydon need to advertise and build audiences. At Cadogan Hall there was a large audience but there Radulovic (a sensational player) gave us the Khachaturian concerto (instead of Tchaikovsky) which will have drawn many of us to attend. And a few of us would have gone to Croydon if there had been no Cadogan concert. The orchestra just about got away with a Sibelius 2 with only 5 cellos!
the photograph is not of the actual concert…there is a piano on stage
So sad. The London Borough of Culture 2023 is Croydon and the announcement of its successful bid was made in early 2020. So Croydon Council has had three years, admittedly in the midst of the pandemic, to plan the project.
This is the current offering:
https://culturecroydon.com/#events
Three events. Count them. The actual opening bun fight is on 1 April (sic) in the blighted Fairfield Halls with the premiere of what is called the “Oratorio of Hope”, involving the London Mozart Players and dozens of pupils from local schools, who apparently have been largely responsible for composing the score. Umm . . .
Would have gone to event but had no idea it was on , not advertised in sutton .
That’s such a shame! I saw the same concert at The Anvil on Saturday, and the soloist and conductor were top notch and having a blast!
Bonkers. Had I known I would have gone.
What a great shame! The Thames creates such a huge divide at times. If only Croydon were on the Underground and not the Overground or the overhead, maybe it would feel like ‘London’? Can say, having sung as a soloist in that lovely hall many times before any renovations, and also in the audience, that it is a far better hall than the plush RFH.
How many were in the public in the 9 other English venues for this tour by a relatively unknown ensemble?
So let me great this straight. In a city of nearly 9 million people, very few people are willing to travel 18km to go hear a concert in a ‘good’ sounding concert hall?!? . . . In the backward colonies, people in southern California would think almost nothing of driving 45 minutes (or more) to get to the Walt Disney Hall . . . or even 90 minutes to get down to the Segerstrom Center in Costa Mesa (Orange County), which also has good acoustics. . . . It seems to me that if folks aren’t willing to make the trip to Croydon, then perhaps you do need a better sounding symphony hall in Central London. And perhaps not building an exact replica of Queen’s Hall after WWII was a big mistake. To my ears, the best sounding recordings from London came from Kingsway Hall, but that appears to be ‘out of the picture’ these days.
Many people in the UK have to travel fpr at least 90 minutes to reach a hall of any description. Certainly one that hosts orchestral concerts.
I heard Solti and the LPO play Bruckner 8th there in about 1975. We drove up from Maidstone.
I’ve never been and would be happy to go, it looks like a nice hall. The visit of the National Symphony Orchestra of Ukraine in October looks appealing – I hope it is properly promoted!