Shared Experience is certainly living up to its name; in a radical departure from normal theatre conventions, the company is currently sharing part of its rehearsal process with audiences as it develops Helen Edmundson’s latest work, Mary Shelley, which tells the astonishing story of how Shelley came to write Frankenstein at the age of only 18.
Private music patrons aim to raise £2 million to fund 400 scholarships for London children with a talent for music. The aim is to give steady four-year support for disadvantaged children to have Saturday lessons, individual coaching and group tuition to learn a musical instrument. Alongside the scholarships, there is to be a "partnership" scheme whereby professional musicians go into schools to work on music with up to 10,000 schoolchildren.
The Royal Opera House's 2011-12 season takes place under the shadow of a 15 per cent cut in public funding and the looming London Olympics. There are 12 ballet bills and 18 opera nights, including one new opera and two new short ballets.
A sliderule of 11-15 per cent reductions in annual grants by 2015, compared with this year, has been applied to Britain's major orchestras, opera, dance, theatre and music organisations. One major gainer is London's Barbican Centre - one major loser is the now world-famous Almeida Theatre, which loses almost 40 per cent of its current annual subsidy despite its reputation for innovation and discovery. However, the Arcola Theatre, another small innovative theatre, gets a big boost. Companies to lose all their grant from next year include Hammersmith's Riverside Studios and Derby Theatre.
The Arts Council’s rearrangement of the dance world by its handling of its 15 per cent subsidy cut shows no change in its persistence in choosing to prefer bureaucratic structures to talent. The 15 per cent cut has been handed straight over to all the ballet companies, with no evidence of strategic thinking about the implications for numbers of dancers, productions or programming. But it’s in the area of contemporary dance that my first impression is of an urge at HQ to pass the buck of decisions to the regions to handle.
The leaders of Britain’s leading arts establishments, from the Royal Opera House, Royal Shakespeare Company and Philharmonia Orchestra to choreographers Akram Khan and Siobhan Davies, have written to the Prime Minister asking him to come clean about his longterm plan for arts subsidies. The letter was released at a crisis meeting this morning at the Young Vic, attended by some 500 arts figures.
Yesterday’s Budget, as expected, tilted future presumptions for arts funding firmly towards a higher proportion of private philanthropy with a series of measures to encourage wealthy individuals through tax quid pro quos to donate to arts either in financial support or in actual works of art.
A glance at the programme hinted at the identity of the orchestra: you don’t perform Prokofiev’s Scythian Suite and Janáček’s Sinfonietta in the same evening unless you’ve industrial quantities of brass and percussion to spare. This was riveting, transcendent stuff, and the most uplifting evening I’ve spent in a concert hall for years. Plus, the echoing barn of Leeds Town Hall is the ideal size for a 170-piece orchestra, a perfect place to experience Janáček’s hocketing brass fanfares. This was the closing concert of the NYO’s winter tour, and an incredible achievement for an orchestra that only assembled two weeks ago.
I was taken to task by a commenter this year who told me I should go and review music, if I couldn't enjoy dance. Hm. One takes such things to heart, but it's humbug. While piling up memories over 25 years might mean that the noise in my memory is getting more and more obtrusive, that doesn't mean you can't suddenly find the corker one night that wipes the field clean and places a new memory there which will move your yardstick yet again.
Last year I took my musical instrument to Tower Hamlets. The heartland of the capital’s huge Bangladeshi community is not a part of London where you expect to hear much orchestral playing. Nor are boroughs like Hackney and Newham ordinarily seen as wellsprings of classical musicians. But they all have a dedicated music services department among whose tasks it is to stimulate instrumental learning.