Soho’s first Classical Revolution was raw, but a definite success. I can think of a million things to improve, and several things to change, but at the very least we hit all our targets (making the bar, if not the artists, a viable profit), a lot of people had a good time, and we were invited back for 24th April (tickets on sale here next week!)
There’s a review, which I think is fairly on-the-mark, on the Cross-Eyed Pianist blog [disclosure: Gavin Dixon is a shareholder in my company, Consonart]. Dixon makes a fascinating point about Eric Satie, and without giving too much away at this point, I think the Parisian ‘furniture music’ needs a more thorough investigation before we write off background noise as undesirable. But more on that later.
Genre is another issue that I’m obsessed with, and again we need to decide if Classical Revolution has to push the boundaries here, or whether the focus is more strictly Classical than the contemporary-music orientation of others (such as Nonclassical). Or do we want to get into the whole argument of what Classical music is anyway? To be continued…
Underlying all of this is the question of demographics – is Classical Revolution for ‘musos’, or ‘newbies’, or both? I think this is becoming clearer, and I’ll write about this again soon.
The ChamberJam was a great success. Ironically, this is the part of the evening I’d been most worried about, but it kind of just flowed. I think this was a result of having really great musicians there (like – really great musicians, who were happy to play just for fun, and a few drinks), and a little bit of pre-planning (I organised the music/players for the first three pieces in advance), and telling people to buy a lot of drinks!
But I think there’s a real opportunity to create something special here; a little bit of Prussia Cove in Soho, perhaps… if all London’s pro musicians, and people passing through on tour, know that the last Tuesday of the month is ‘late night chamber music in Soho’ night, then you could get some very special musical interactions happening indeed.
Vive la Revolution!
