Cheltenham Music acquires an artistic director
NewsThe festival, which lost all of its staff six months ago, has named Jack Bazalgette as artistic director from 2025.
Bazalgette is a Hackney-based conductor who has worked as chorusmaster with the Prague Symphony Orchestra and was Senior Conductor of the Cambridge University Symphony Orchestra.
Let’s hear it for the boys
Yawn. How do these people get these roles? Mid-20s, yet has the capital to start a concert series in London. Expensive website, venues and so on but still barely any experience, gets a director role at Cheltenham. Daddy’s money and influence?
Through the Noise started with no capital whatsoever – the venues, website and everything else is paid for with tickets/crowdfunding. Hard to criticise when they aren’t even taking any state money!!
Cambridge University Symphony? How pathetic.
That’s a shockingly weak cv. Is Peter his Dad, and does that explain all this?
Ye Gods, this country…
Three vitriolic comments so far. Way to go slippedisc.com. Jack is one of the good guys. Have any of the posters been to a through the noise event? Good appointment
Another Joe:
“One of the good guys” is nice, but it’s not relevant and not my point.
If JB is from a state school in Hartlepool, then I’m happy to admit I’m wrong, paranoid and my rant unhinged.
Using privilege, family network and contacts is not unusual in any Start Up, but in the Arts industry, it is problematic. Any little success is hoovered up by an industry (desperate for ‘relevance’) and can become a blueprint for public funding.
Yes, I have been to through the noise (all small case: take that punctuation!) and Nonclassial, Bold Tendencies, events by LCO, Aurora and Southbank Sinfonia. I’m not your imaginary insular and closed minded classical bogie man. I am interested in new presentation but I spotted the pattern years ago: The audience for these gigs are a mono-neo Glyndebourne crowd.
All these events cater for the same echo chamber/narrow audience: Hackneyesque, £5 coffee/£8 craft beer paying, 20’s, upper/middle class. A tiny percent of the country.
Nothing wrong with that, IF it wasn’t held up as the ‘future’ of new Classical concerts. The natural progression for this is now: Alternative venue = good. Concert Hall = bad. This has created another pretention and more exclusiveness. Yet organisers pat themselves on the back, convincing themselves they are ground breaking and the talented few are promoted through the ranks of Arts circles. Others move into organisations, which are staffed more and more by Ivy league Uni graduates, who have been brought up on this blueprint/model and then everything ends up looking the same.
In an increasingly desperate funding situation, classical organisations are scrambling to follow this blue print, hoping to be sanctioned by the Anti-tradition/Decolonised ACE. An irony being, these audiences are far from diverse.
Did you see the failure of ‘Unboxed’? A prime example of an isolated, creative class taking their events to regular audiences, failing to connect and wasting millions.
Honestly, good luck to JB. I genuinely hope he can crack the code to opening classical music to new listeners, old hands and everyone inbetween. I think we all want that. Though attracting a new, but narrow audience is not a win, however much appaulse a hip event gets from the creative management class.
You can’t classify the audience for Through the Noise events as ‘neo Glydnebourne’ and ‘Hackneyesque’ – they’re now taking place right across the country – Glasgow, Newcastle, Leeds etc.
Oh Will, don’t be so literal, you know exactly what I’m saying: I’m not refering to geography! They (and similar events) attract a very narrow audience, as narrow as Glyndebourne.
There are Hackneyesque types in Glasgow, Leeds or Leeds!! A few gigs out of Hackney to the same kind if crowd is hardly ground breaking and self proclaimed ‘future’.
You wonder how these people at that age get such jobs on so little experience? Hackney-based? Probably the expensive Lauriston Village. Means nothing. Hardly an east ender of any sort. They only live there as they can’t afford Battersea, Pimlico or Hampstead.
Who?
Yes indeed!
I only listen to famous people. It saves a lot of work.
Sally
He’s not related to that bloke with the same surname FYI. And for the Noisenights sceptics (of which I am one, in some ways), to their credit they bring sold out young audiences to dozens of random venues in small towns outside northern cities to hear a mix of challenging classical rep and crossover stuff. It’s not like he’s living in some Hackney bubble doing events for his mates.