‘Is that rain?” asks Kate Whitley. We’re standing on the top of Peckham’s multi-storey car park, two hours before the orchestra she founded performs Beethoven’s Pastoral symphony in this adorable, windswept, brutalist lump. The genial security guard tells her the forecast is good. What does he know? It’s London in July: anything could happen.
Whitley, 27, an award-winning composer and pianist, is already having a bad week. She had a crash in her mother’s car, suffered facial cuts, and now has to rely on the generosity of a housemate to ferry her viola player, who has a broken leg, to tonight’s gig. Some of the 50 musicians, the bass players in particular, are not thrilled about having to heft their instruments up the stairs (the lifts haven’t worked for years). And now it’s not the few drops of rain that are worrying Whitley so much as the summer breeze, which could carry off the scores despite the pegs securing them to music stands.
Whitley has chosen an acoustic disaster area for the concert, too. Trains rattle by below; across the rooftops, you can make out dialogue from the nearby Bussey Building’s outdoor cinema season; and sounds from SE15’s many bars do battle with the music made by Whitley’s Multi-Story orchestra, as they are called. “There’s a great 20-minute viola solo in Grisey’s Les Espaces Acoustiques, which we performed here last year,” she says. “During the quieter moments, you could hear pounding rock from some bar.” What was it? “Oasis, I think.”
So why bother? Isn’t putting on orchestral concerts in a 10-storey car park just a gimmick, yielding clever headlines (“Orchestral manoeuvres in the car park” and “Peckham’s car park arts hub works on so many levels”) but little of real cultural benefit? Not at all, says Whitley. “It’s a perilous business,” she laughs, “but worthwhile. The orchestra and the audience are really close. That intimacy is something you don’t often get in the concert hall.”
Since 2011, when they played Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring here, Multi-Story has been trying to get to the audiences that ordinary venues don’t reach. That’s why, no doubt, when Proms director David Pickard heard a Multi-Story concert here last year, he was so impressed he invited Whitley and co-founder, the conductor Christopher Stark, to put on a concert as part of the Proms. So, in September, the Proms will come to Peckham for Multi-Story’s concert of works by Steve Reich, including his Music for a Large Ensemble. “This is the point,” says Whitley. “We’re playing music that we think is great and we think everybody, given the chance, would love. We want as many different people from as many different backgrounds as possible.”
That’s an honourable hope. Later, when tonight’s Beethoven begins, the 800-strong audience, although younger and hipper than your average classical crowd, hardly reflects the neighbourhood. According to the 2001 census, 36% of Peckham was black African, 15% black Caribbean and 26% white British. In 2015, it’s one of the most ethnically diverse districts of London. Sadly, that diversity is not visible up here.
There’s a risk that – despite the glowing headlines (“The response was ecstatic and it deserved to be,” said the New York Times) – Whitley’s initiative (and the wonderful work done by Bold Tendencies, which runs this car park as an arts centre) is not for locals but for bussed-in cultural gadflies like me and my party of friends and family.
We come for drinks at rooftop bar Frank’s. Then we promenade through the superb sculpture park that includes a recreation of Derek Jarman’s Dungeness garden, not to mention Agora, Richard Wentworth’s snaking painted silver line. We giggle over Adel Abdessemed’s sinister Bristow, a life-size steel sculpture of a pigeon with explosives and a BlackBerry strapped to its back. Then we descend to level nine (which fortunately has a roof) to hear the concert, and take the 63 home, happy but with just a niggling doubt: the whole soiree hasn’t engaged new audiences. Or not enough.
Whitley and Bold Tendencies are aware of the risk of preaching to the culturally converted and insist they’re working hard to make sure that isn’t the case. “It’s amazing to do this performance,” says Whitley. “But getting to the local kids is the reason I do this project.” Two days earlier, she and Stark invited 60 local teenagers to a private performance of Beethoven’s Pastoral in the car park. Like the paying punters tonight, these teenagers wandered around different zones, where groups of musicians had set up to perform little segments of the work, offering introductory insights. And then, like us, they heard the symphony performed straight through, albeit with occasional unscored wailing from express trains to Victoria.
“The schools section is my favourite part of the project,” says Whitley. It does seem to be her passion. In 2014, the Cambridge music alumna won a British Composer award for Alive, a piece scored for children’s choir and orchestra that premiered here last summer, performed by Multi-Story, Southwark Youth Orchestra, Lewisham Schools Sinfonia and Peckham Chamber Orchestra. And Multi-Story’s outreach work is getting more sophisticated: since May, the orchestra has been visiting five schools in a day, giving over 1,000 children in playgrounds and school halls their first live orchestral experience.
“Today there are too little resources for music,” she says. “That has to change. I know several orchestral musicians who are great and got where they are through state school music lessons. They were blessed, from a blessed time when there was more money for music and better opportunities for children of all backgrounds.” And so there’s a risk that classical music becomes merely an elitist preserve for children whose parents can afford lessons or private schooling? “That’s becoming the reality in many places.”
It’s 7.15pm and violinist Yolande is explaining how Beethoven wrote the symphony’s Storm movement. She gets about 50 of us to jump up and down and slap our thighs to simulate thunderclaps and then listen to how Beethoven creates the sound of raindrops. It’s A Young Person’s Guide to the Orchestra meets gentle calisthenics.
At 7.20pm, in a pop-up auditorium called the Hay Bale Arena, French horn player Jonathan talks us through the final movement. My 10-year-old daughter is press-ganged into joining the musicians – holding up a sign that says “double bass” whenever the bass player plays.
At 8pm, we take our seats. Many of the musicians are dressed in T-shirts and shorts, much like the audience. It’s a sweetly intimate atmosphere – we’re already on first name terms with the string section. At the end of the first movement, applause breaks out, in defiance of irksome tradition, though things turn prickly when some audience members shush the clappers.
Playing the Pastoral amid all this concrete seems a witty touch, but the soft breezes and sunny cloudscapes hanging over our epic views of London make it curiously apposite. As the storm of the third movement breaks into the glowing finale, the sun, as if operated by some celestial lighting designer, breaks through the clouds. Most of the audience is on its feet applauding rapturously, before rushing to the roof to savour the sunset – and get a nightcap at Frank’s. All in all, quite a rooftop epiphany. It seems a good omen for what Whitley is trying to do.
- Multi-Story’s summer season continues with Schoenberg’s Pierrot Lunaire 23 and 24 July. Details: multi-story.org.uk. The Prom is on 3 September.
