Harrison Birtwistle, arguably Britain's greatest living composer, was once asked what he thought the "man on the street" would make of his music. His initial response was a pause, accompanied by a slow-spreading grin that cut cleanly through his thick bristles, and through the composure of his shuffling interlocutor. After a carefully timed pause - worthy of any Sinfonietta percussionist - he answered. "Who's this man on the street? I think I've got a problem with the man on the street."
The throng of men and women on the street who, over the weekend, had joyfully reclaimed London's newly-reopened Royal Festival Hall as their own, had more or less dispersed by the time of Monday night's opening concert. Round the corner it was business as usual, with ladies having tea outside the Hayward Gallery while kids practised their parkour on the Purcell Room's east wall. In front of the hall itself, passers-by were cooling down in the new water fountains and enjoying the kind of café pleasures that should have graced the South Bank long ago but somehow never did.
Up above, on the terrace that crowns the "People's Palace", men and women who have left the street far behind were drinking champagne, the bubbles catching the evening sunlight as it bounced of the gleaming, newly-polished Portland stone. With up to £500 a ticket, the elite crowd were certainly buckling down to drinking their money's worth.
Birtwistle's Cortège, a "newly-refurbished" work originally composed in 1986 and in many ways the concert's centrepiece, represented an elite of a thoroughly different kind. Like its composer, the music expressed the democratic spirit in which the hall originally became. Uncompromising in its semi-ritualistic experimentation, the work is also a plain-speaking, no-bullshit piece of solid musical craftsmanship.
Fourteen members of the London Sinfonietta in a semi-circle, each a soloist in turn, moving to the central spot just in time to catch the line - an amorphous but mysteriously compelling arabesque - as it falls from the previous player, before themselves handing on the baton and taking the place of their successor on the fringe. The music spins a glistening web of sound, a web with no firm centre, no existence beyond the minutely controlled yet palpably physical blowings, bangings, pushing and pullings of the musicians. The air thick with the vibration of strings and hollow brass, Cortège is a work that captures the collaborative spirit at the heart of the idea both of music and democracy, a spirit characterised by sweaty, brow-furrowing effort and an evanescent central focus ever in danger of disappearing.
This was, after all, what the event was supposed to be about. Built in 1951 just three years after being commissioned, the Festival Hall was designed to be a genuinely public concert hall. With no bad seats, no separate bars for different classes of audience, the building was intended to represent the arts reaching out to the "man on the streat".
Birtwistle's web reached out, sustaining the rest of the programme through constructive reminiscence and anticipation. Julian Anderson's fresh, dangerously anarchic new Alleluia, Stravinsky's delicately elemental Firebird Suite, and Ives's Unanswered Question, shimmering in the hall's new acoustic, all three of them exercises in the growing obsolescence of tunefulness, and all three of them illuminated by echoes in Birtwistle's vulnerable, frail melodism. Afterwards, Ligeti's Atmosphères and the finale of Beethoven's Choral Symphony, performed by the massive assembled forces of the Festival Hall's three resident orchestras, were stripped back to their roots to expose the honest toil that characterises the composer's struggle with the central question of how to sound, how to be. Even Ravel's "masterpiece of nothing", Boléro, ostensibly wheeled out to pay the gala crowd its dues, rode the Hall's clear, warm acoustic like a steam train, wheels glistening and pushing onwards with blind mechanical certainty into the unknown musical future.
The first-class passengers, tanked up and steaming on industrial quantities of champagne, applauded and rose to greet the bright future. But Birtwistle's cortège, as the name implies, is a funeral piece, originally written for the composer's friend Michael Vyner, the Sinfonietta's first artistic director. The angry outburst of the trumpet's last attempt to resurrect the arabesque is silenced by a final crash and thud on the piano and drum, and the work ends in a drowned protest against the fact of death.
Twenty years later, the protest was less personal, striking a more general, open-ended note. Perhaps it was a protest against creeping philistinism, present in the form of numerous empty seats and the cellphone solo that interrupted the Firebird's first bars with a snatch of Mozart's G minor symphony. Perhaps it expressed unease with the evening's suited and booted audience, an unease which, it must be said, was mutual (one voice, nearby, after the slither of Purcell that followed Cortège: "Now that was real music"). More likely it was just a simpler, less combative answer to his initial question. Who's this man on the street? Why doesn't he come? Why is he outside and not in here, making the music happen?
Meanwhile the elite sat, bemused, waiting patiently for the "real music" to begin.
