News that Jonathan Nott - who has transformed the Bamberg Symphony Orchestra in the 15 years he’s been its principal conductor - is to start a new job with the Orchestre de la Suisse Romande in Geneva in 2017 (his contract ends in Bamberg next year), brings with it the coincidence of a planned new hall for the Swiss orchestra, replacing the Suisse Romande’s current home, the Victoria Hall. It’s one of the axioms of orchestral life that great orchestras need great halls in order to develop as an ensemble, and it’s something that today’s finest conductors have as a defining mission statement. Mariss Jansons has campaigned for a new hall in Munich for his Bavarian Radio Symphony Orchestra for over a decade - a project that is now in jeopardy, thanks to the latest machination of Munich-based politics (as Jens F. Laurson reports here). On these shores, rumours suggest that were Simon Rattle to be thinking about possibly running the London Symphony Orchestra, he would, hypothetically, in an ideal world where everything’s putatively perfect, demand, or rather catalyse, the construction of a new concert hall somewhere, somehow, in all probability in the City of London. Perhaps...
The evidence is hard to dispute: it’s not-quite-but-almost a truism that the best orchestras have the best halls - think of, say, the Concertgebouw (“concert building”) in Amsterdam and the orchestra with which it is synonymous, the Vienna Philharmonic and the Musikverein, the Berliner Philharmoniker and the Philharmonie in Berlin, the Cleveland Orchestra and Severance Hall, the Boston Symphony and their Symphony Hall. (The LSO would rightly dispute that; nobody claims that the Barbican Hall is the finest of the world’s acoustics - although it has, I think, real presence and power if you’re sitting in a lucky seat - yet the LSO remains near the top of the world-orchestra-tree - a rather Wagnerian locution I might have to copyright). The issue, of course, is whether all this maestro-power will work its magic on the politicians, the planners, and the business sponsors of their respective cities. In Geneva, they’re at an early stage, in Munich, after years of debate, the politicians have apparently opted for a terrible bodge, and in London… Well: I have the sense that although nothing has been publicly announced, there are some possibly positive noises off at the moment; but whether that will turn into the churn of diggers, earth-movers, and pile-drivers remains to be seen. Who knows? But if anyone were to have the clout to get things moving in that direction, it’s Rattle.
