Before last night's Royal Festival Hall re-opening concert, the only thing present in larger quantites than champagne was anticipation. How would the new acoustic square up to a full(ish) auditorium, and a programme ranging from a sparse, spatially dispersed Unanswered Question to the two-choir/three-orchestra rendition of the finale of Beethoven's Ninth? How would the gala set respond to the progressive programme?
The answer to the second question came soon enough. After only a few bars of Stravinsky's Firebird, and not long after Lord Hollick reminded everyone to switch off their mobiles, the unmistakable opening of Mozart's G minor symphony rose up from one of the "open-drawer" boxes. It was well into the answer phrase, and well after Vladimir Jurowski had silenced his players, that the machine was switched off. Was someone, somewhere, inadvertently even, protesting the absence of pomp to fit the circumstance?
Of the two unanswered questions, though, the more urgent was the first. After all, expensive though the opening concert must have been, it was the Hall's refit that cost £115m, much of that sum going towards the remodelling of the concert hall's once famously flat acoustics. Clearly as delighted by the programme as by the performances of Jurowski and Marin Alsop, our own Andrew Clements was impressed by the hall's new sound. "First impressions", he concludes, "are good."
Michael Church, writing in the Independent agreed. "Kaleidoscopic though this evening was, it represented only half the battle," he contends. "The real acoustic test will come on Thursday, when Alfred Brendel plays his Steinway. Then we shall know."
For Geoffrey Norris, however, the Royal Festival Hall has passed the test with flying colours. Writing in the Daily Telegraph, the tone is one of unequivocal rejoicing. "After decades of desiccated sound-quality, the hall now has a bloom, and gives the music room to breathe ... The way the sound is now reflected and clarified rather than being soaked up and deadened has to be the most important of all the multi-million-pound improvements. You almost felt like shouting out loud the title of the piece that started the concert: Alleluia!"
The Times's, Richard Morrison joined in the others' praise for the concert programmers effort to draw attention to the fact that "classical music has a future as well as a past", but was more sceptical about the sound. "The acoustic was certainly livelier. Vladimir Jurowski's brilliant reading of Stravinsky's Firebird Suite set the wild echoes flying. But it wasn't noticeably warmer. The sound seems to be pushed forward more vividly, but the resonance (especially at the bass end) doesn't seem vastly changed. This will still be a hall that gives bad musicians nowhere to hide."
To which one might respond that they've no business inviting bad musicians to play there. On that score as well, it seems, so far, so good.
