To make it up to my daughter for having forgotten the LSO concert at the Bath Festival, my husband took her to the Barbican in London to hear the same performers and composers, but different symphonies (Schubert’s Unfinished and Bruckner’s 6th). He carefully calculated the length of the pieces from our recordings, allowed a little extra for luck and booked tickets for a particular train back to Bath afterwards accordingly.
However all these calculations were thrown when an extra piece appeared on the programme unheralded. It turned out to be Azalea Fragments by Joe Duddell, conducted by Pavel Kotla. The composer took a bow, but few in the audience knew who he was, as in order to find out you would have had to have bought the full programme, rather than just picking up the programme notes as my family and most of the rest of the audience had done.
Now it’s good to have a new piece programmed alongside war-horses, but why was it so hard to find out what it was called, what it was about, who wrote it, who conducted it and some biography about these people? Even the full programme only gave the names of the performers and the piece, and a relative of my husband’s who deps in the LSO happened to be playing but couldn’t supply any more details. The Barbican is festooned with information screens which could have given some clue, or someone could have stood up and said a few words before the performance.
My gripe isn’t just about this but also that the extra unpublicised piece in the concert created problems for the return train journey (a taxi did get them there in time). Are concert audiences in London really so frightened of new music that they won’t come if it’s advertised in advance? The Barbican did something similar when I last went to a concert there, a few years ago; there was a lengthy speech which caused the concert to end some ten minutes later than expected.
So I would repeat what I said in a letter to the management after that concert; remember that a part of your audience comes from outside London and may be booked on a particular train out of London. If the concert ends significantly later than scheduled, they may miss that train, which could mean the difference between being home at midnight and being home at 2 a.m., and could be expensive if their ticket was valid for the earlier train only, as cheaper tickets generally now are. Even if this doesn’t happen, their enjoyment of the concert will be spoiled by worries about the return journey. If they are regular concert-goers in London, they may desert the Barbican in favour of venues where concerts end at a predictable time.
The Guardian reviewed the concert here, the Times here, both very favourably, and the Sunday Times complains about lack of information about the Duddell here.