When the Royal Festival Hall opened on 3 May 1951, the first concert, conducted by Sir Adrian Boult and Sir Malcolm Sargent, was a programme of British music - Elgar, Purcell, Arne and Vaughan Williams. Fifty-six years later, for the weekend that marked the reopening, we got a "gamelanathon", ballroom dancing, a Billy Bragg busk-along and a massed choir of Lambeth schoolchildren singing Waterloo Sunset. How times have changed.
The Daily Telegraph's Simon Heffer will no doubt see it as a dumbed-down, politically correct sell-out - the temple of high art reborn as a festival of fun - but I had a great time. The sun shone, the beer flowed, Billy Bragg sang Underneath the Arches with his mother - arms linked across the ages, he told us she'd worked at the Festival Hall back in 1951 - and the Lambeth kids' rendition of Deep River reduced me to tears. Not because of their shrill singing, by the way. This great spiritual always makes me go weak at the knees.
"This is madness", I heard a man say as I stood clutching my beer at the back of the crowd watching Bragg on the Riverside Terrace. You could see what he meant: he and the woman he was with had seven children in tow, all of whom appeared to have spent most of the afternoon under the newly installed fountain next to the Queen Elizabeth Hall. It was that kind of day: sticky, celebratory, a little bit crazy. Even if you didn't know your Arne from your Elgar, a good time was guaranteed.
This was a celebration of culture in the broadest sense. Was the busking bongo player you encountered as you walked across to the Festival Hall from Waterloo station part of the festivities? Probably not, but he could have been, and was doing excellent business. Even the skateboarders and BMX bikers in their graffiti-covered concrete bowl underneath the arts complex attracted a crowd of a hundred or so. See it as an art installation, Simon.
I've always had doubts about the auditorium itself: too big for anything except a rip-roaring orchestral work, and with a horrible bloc of seats at the back where you sit under an overhang - really oppressive, avoid at all costs. It's not a great hall, but it is a great idea - art for everyone - and that was what was being plugged ferociously on Saturday. "This opening weekend is both a welcome and a statement of intent," said Jude Kelly, artistic director of the South Bank Centre, introducing the Lambeth kids. "This place belongs to the future, and everyone's imagination will have a role in shaping it."
Events were free, performers relaxed, audiences enthusiastic. With several things going on at once, it was fun to amble from one to another. Bored with the charming but shambolic Bragg? Try Natalie Clein playing Bach's Cello Suite No 1 in the Ballroom. And if you find the horrible amplification and tightly packed audience offputting, maybe the gamelanathon upstairs will be for you - gentle, relaxing, eternal. The Festival Hall has always been obsessed by its gamelan, and here aficionados were bashing away for seventeen and a half hours on Saturday, with another 10-hour shift to follow on Sunday. I plink therefore I am. Judging by the number of people in the audience with floral shirts and glazed expressions, quite a few intended to stay the course.
After Monday evening's bow-tied gala, the revamped hall gets down to a cracking first season: Salonen and Mahler 3, Mackerras with the Philharmonia, Uchida playing Mozart, Marin Alsop conducting The Rite of Spring, two appearances by Alfred Brendel, Jarvis Cocker's Meltdown Festival. The trick will be to add the necessary layers of cultural challenge while retaining some of the ease and spontaneity of the opening weekend. I reckon it will get the balance right. The fact that the hall is now surrounded by cafes, restaurants and shops, rather than concrete walkways, surely helps. Ignore those who moan about the commodication of culture. Shopping and Chopin can be reconciled. Art and enjoyment are not antonyms.
