One concert venue has never worried about pin-drop silence. Trains, sirens and squawking gulls are part of the Bold Tendencies experience at Peckham’s multistorey car park. Instead of shutting the world out, it embraces its uncontrollable dramas: noise, skyline, weather. The act of listening becomes more intense. Covered yet open to the elements, this concrete cathedral may be more important to our cultural future than anyone could have imagined.
For the past two weekends an audience of 160 (usual capacity 500), well spaced, felt like a crowd, especially when on its collective feet, cheering. And no wonder: the first event in a swiftly organised post-lockdown concert series was given by the cellist-pianist brother and sister Sheku and Isata Kanneh-Mason, with a second a week later by the young Russian pianists Pavel Kolesnikov and Samson Tsoy. Each duo gave an early and a late concert. These are world-class musicians, the choice of Hannah Barry, the visionary impresario behind Bold Tendencies. A gallery owner in the area for a decade, she also has a strong musical background and has been staging a broad range of classical music there since 2011. Barely two months ago, realising ordinary concert life was still no-go, Barry looked around and went for the best, the most talked about and interesting.
The Kanneh-Masons’ recital – their first live concert since March – was planned for Wigmore Hall, cancelled because of Covid-19. They’re repeating it today at Snape Maltings, twice, and again at the Proms (as far as I understand, pre-recorded, without an audience) on 11 September. The Proms has been to Bold Tendencies, in 2016 and 2017. Could they have ventured from South Kensington to south-east London again and played to a crowd, small but symbolic, in this most challenging and depleted of seasons? Perhaps Barry could be let loose on the Royal Albert Hall.
One problem critics have had in the pandemic – to which the right riposte is critics’ problems in a pandemic, even more than ever, are worth zero; but I’ll go on – is that merely performing is itself deserving of praise. Usual critical perceptions are irrelevant when a player has risked health, mustered energy and jumped technical hurdles to get music out there. In each Bold event we had the luxury of extended performance, without apology. But surely the acoustic must be terrible? No. In 2017, Cooke Fawcett Architects installed a plywood “concertina” acoustic wall. Other expert technicians work constantly to fine-tune the sonic character of the place, with excellent results.
First up in the Kanneh-Masons’ programme was Beethoven’s Cello Sonata in C major, Op 102, No 1. Written after a period of crisis, one of the first works in the composer’s late period, the piece is compressed, explosive, enigmatic, with a brief, eloquent slow movement and a finale full of jolts and interruptions. How they played with such ease and accuracy given that each time Sheku looked to his sister, to take or give a cue, he must have been dazzled by the setting sun all but obscuring her in what might once have been called a corona, is anyone’s guess. Call it sibling harmony. In Rachmaninov’s grand, four-movement sonata, Sheku’s lyricism was both foil and peer to Isata’s muscularity and fire.
Pavel Kolesnikov first came to inspect the brutalist ex-car park six weeks ago and immediately elected Messiaen’s Visions de l’Amen. Surely a Peckham first. This 40-minute work for two pianos, written in 1943 for the composer and his wife and former student, Yvonne Loriod, shimmers, sings and roars, as anything encapsulating birdsong and ecstasy, tender desire, angels and eternity well might. The clangorous peals and chimes of the Amen of Consummation, with Samson Tsoy playing Loriod’s high, sparky “primo” part and Kolesnikov relishing the thunderous depths of Messiaen’s own “secondo” role, made a thrilling finale. This was the first time the duo, who also live together, had played the work since performing it as an exam piece when both were students at the Royal College of Music.
In the second concert of the evening, Tsoy gave an edgy account of Beethoven’s “Moonlight” sonata, urgent and propulsive but poetic where needed. Kolesnikov’s special gift of introversion proved compelling in The Night’s Music from Bartók’s Out of Doors. The pair ended with Schubert’s F minor Fantasie, D940 for four hands, one piano, each conducting the other with a spare arm, poignant and intimate in this work’s treacherous journey from simplicity to darkness.
So if you ever thought staging concerts in an old car park had to be a short-lived fad, think again. Far from being merely local – its ambitions, as we can see, are sky-high – this not-for-profit organisation’s great strength lies in its community, for audience and support. Birmingham, Newcastle and other great UK cities already know the importance of nurturing roots. With London’s big concert halls – the Royal Festival Hall, the Barbican – still determining a route ahead, the capital too must look to its neighbourhoods. Bold Tendencies is an example of how, with inspiration, the marginal can move centre stage.
This week I should also have written about a tiny festival in Pyrton, Oxfordshire, initiated by the pianist-composer Ryan Wigglesworth and soprano Sophie Bevan, and the return of music-making to Aldeburgh: two further endeavours inspired by lockdown. Both had their opening weekends blown out when a government green light switched to red a fortnight ago. This weekend they are back in action. Watch Bevan and Wigglesworth, below, a reminder of what we’ve been missing, and of what is yet to come.
Isata Kanneh-Mason returns to Bold Tendencies on 18 September, 7pm & 9.15pm; Pavel Kolesnikov and Samson Tsoy return with special guests on 19 September, 7pm & 9.15pm
