Revelations (18.6.88)

Mr Anthony Rooley is an enterprising man.  Not content with more or less single-handedly rescuing vast tracts of English and Italian Renaissance music from obscurity, and recording it with his Consorte of Musicke, he then hankers after even more unreasonable propositions.  Like an all-night performance of Italian music built around Orazio Vecchio's Le Vegile di Siena - The Revels of Siena - at the Queen Elizabeth Hall.  A folly, clearly; and yet the place was packed at the start and nearly full at the end when the audience marched out for its croissants.

Independently of the musical worth of such a concert - and this was high - it is interesting to consider the occasion as a rare kind of laboratory in which a thousand willing human guinea pigs had placed themselves.  For many of the taboos implicit in public classical music-making were flouted, rent by the boilerhouse pressure of the experience.

Consider the facts.  The concert ran continuously, without formal intervals. Even for the most passionate early music fan, remaining seated for eight hours was clearly out of the question.  So the audience was allowed to roam in and out as they pleased - though a modicum of consideration for those still listening was required and usually obtained.

Several things flowed from this.  There was a constant flow of people not just at the end of sections, but at the end of pieces.  After all, once the principle of set exit and entrance times has been breached, any point is as good as another.  There was a gentle hubbub most of the time caused by this entrance and exit, and as a knock-on from it, since we are trained to equate movement of people in a theatre of concert hall with the liberty to talk.  Noise was also generated by the sounds of cups and glasses being brought into the auditorium, put down, and tripped over.  Again, this unprecedented activity flowed from people's need for constant stimulants - tea and coffee were on tap free throughout the night - and their desire not to miss the concert.  The result was quite obvious obbligato parts for cups and saucer in many of the quieter pieces.

The same freedom of movement produced another curious side-effect.  It was possible to leave the confined hall and go out onto the South Bank.  Doing so throughout the night produced a sequence of snap-shots of London, the most memorable of them being that of dawn rising over the City.  These shifting and lightening skies were in stark contrast to the changeless and artificial world inside.  It was like literally stepping out of reality.

The length of the concert, and the fact that it proceeded seamlessly, only emphasised this effect.  As the audience grew tired, its sense of time and place grew fuzzy.  The choice of music, mostly liquid madrigals, distant dances, and the tiny evanescent sound of lutes, conspired to make the audience believe that it was sinking very slowly into another realm, half human, half heavenly.  This, you were tempted to think, is what it would be like to go gently into that night.

So at the end of this feast of civilised revels you were glad to be in London, and glad of Mr Rooley.  Taking part proved a small revelation.

(19.6.88)

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