Put on your red shoes and dance
.... to Luciano Berio
Photograph: Alastair Grant/AP
The Paris Opera is a voluptuous second empire carnival of gilt curlicues, sweeping marble staircases, fluted columns, sumptuous allegorical figures, plush and velvet - rightly known as the Palais Garnier, for palatial it certainly is (except for the ladies' loos, but that would surely be asking too much).
It felt strangely disorienting, then - once we had ascended to our seats as gracefully as it is possible to do when you have been slightly snubbed by the rather superior persons who check your bag and give you your ticket - to find ourselves amid all this splendour for a contemporary music concert, the sort of contemporary music concert, in fact, that one might in Britain hear within the dilapidated brutalist squalor of the Queen Elizabeth Hall in London.
Here, though, was the opposite extreme: we even had to be let in, with a key, to our actual box - coat hooks at the back and a little velvet-covered bench on which you could have reclined, you assume, had the Berg or the Dutilleux got all too much. Above our heads soared a great dome covered with Chagall's candyfloss-coloured figures describing stories from the great operas and ballets; below us the great vaulting proscenium arch and a great deal more ornate marble and gilt.
The audience matched the scene: four-inch designer heels, well-cut coats, beautifully tailored suits. Where, bless them, were the French anorak-clad new-music geeks come to hear Dutilleux's newish piece Correspondances and Oliver Knussen's Third Symphony conducted by the composer? Do the French even have anorak-clad new-music geeks?
I'm not by any means saying we should all get dressed up in Yves Saint Laurent every time they programme Berio on the South Bank - but the evening was undeniably transformed by its dramatic context into an Event. Just as every concert in the benighted QEH is transformed into the equivalent of waiting for your connection on the platform of Wakefield station on a freezing November afternoon. Bring in the demolition crew, I say.
