Nicholas Kenyon: the Barbican's next managing director. Photograph: Martin Argles
What Ian Bostridge says in celebration of the Barbican on its 25th birthday is true. And yet now, more than ever, it can't afford to be complacent. Breathless reports from those who have seen inside the renovated Royal Festival Hall, due to reopen on June 11, suggest that the Barbican's hold on concert audiences is going to be getting some very stiff competition indeed.
What the Barbican Centre lacks is any kind of surrounding buzz. As a building, the arts centre part of it is almost invisible (last time I went there at a weekend I got stopped 50 yards short of the front door by someone asking where it was, while looking straight at it). The City as a network of donors may have been good to the Barbican, as Bostridge says, but the City as a location is a real downer for anyone without an EC postcode. On a Saturday night, there is nothing rolling down the surrounding streets except taxis and tumbleweed, and all the nearest pubs are shut. Yes, there are some great bars and restaurants within a 15-minute walk, but you need to know where you are going - and if Londoners don't want to have a night out in this area, why should people in the Barbican Centre's notional catchment area outside London want to make the effort?
Contrast this with the optimistic new South Bank, whose fantastic location we are finally learning to make the most of, where the second-hand bookstalls do a roaring trade during the day and the new bars and restaurants on the riverside strip are already reliably full, even with the concert hall still closed. The Festival Hall is visible in a way that the Barbican, nestling in the crooked elbow of Silk Street, never can be, even from 50 yards away.
And then we come to what goes on inside the concert hall. Yes, the Barbican is the home of what is still, arguably, the UK's most consistently fine symphony orchestra, the LSO. Yet the London Philharmonic and the Philharmonia, both resident at the Festival Hall, are constantly snapping at its heels, and on a good night can overtake it. More importantly, with Vladimir Jurowski and Esa-Pekka Salonen respectively, the LPO and Philharmonia have exciting new music directors poised to take their orchestras in new directions, which makes the LSO's hiring of Valery Gergiev look even more misguided. And before you shout, Gergiev has indeed been the driving force of some of the most exciting orchestral concerts I've ever heard. But do you honestly think he's going to clear enough time in his international schedule to be a real, developmental, guiding hand for the LSO?
Then there's the appointment of Proms director Nicholas Kenyon as the Barbican's next managing director, which, while reassuring to concert audiences on one level, also seems a safe rather than innovative choice. All the signs are that, once its rival concert hall reopens, the Barbican is going to have to run very fast just to stand still.
