Weirdest concert halls: the early years... warehouses, pump rooms and the Thames Tunnel
Who knows how far back the history of wacky locations for musical performance goes, but for the sake of argument let’s first visit the warehouse in London’s Clerkenwell owned by Thomas Britton, a cultured charcoal merchant with wide leisure interests, not least quality music. For nearly 40 years from 1678, serious-minded music-lovers (each paying a ten shilling yearly subscription) clambered up the warehouse stairs to Britton’s ‘Palace’ to be entertained.
For centuries, there was a tradition of performances in the ‘music rooms’ of taverns, then joined by the ‘pump rooms’ of spas such as Bath and Cheltenham, where ‘the quality’ gathered to imbibe the waters and the music. (The Pump Room Trio still performs daily in Bath). But for sheer wackiness, a favourite example before the modern era has to be from November 1827, when engineer Isambard Kingdom Brunel threw a celebratory dinner in his new Thames Tunnel, the grand public thoroughfare under the river. ‘The band of the Coldstream Guards… added to the great brilliancy of the scene,’ the press reported.
Weirdest concert halls: the war years
Fast-forward to the 20th century, when during two world wars classical music was seen as an essential element in the entertainment mix, to boost public morale. In the UK, during the second of those conflicts, a wide array of locations doubled as concert venues – even Chislehurst Caves, in Kent. In one report we read that ‘[Lev] Pouishnoff, the famous pianist, has been playing to war workers in factories in various parts of the country.’ An echo there of what had been happening previously not just during World War I, but in the USSR after the 1917 Revolution, with professional musicians taking serious music to cafés and canteens, factories, workers’ clubs and military barracks. The aim, to enhance the quality of people’s lives in the new Soviet workers’ ‘paradise’.
Snape Maltings: a welcoming space
In the modern world, the drive to explore unusual venues has had much to do with finding new ways of attracting audiences, offering something different and perhaps less ‘threatening’ than conventional spaces. If in addition an artistic case can be made for a given venue, very much the better. The early post-war exemplar has to be the Snape Maltings concert hall in Suffolk, re-purposed from its brewing industry role by Benjamin Britten and Peter Pears. Yes, their urgent concern was to find a suitably sized hall to house a range of concerts as their Aldeburgh Festival grew in scale – the bonus being the excellence of the Maltings acoustic.
However, Chris Hilton, head of Archive and Library at the Britten-Pears Foundation, observes that Snape Maltings has always attracted audiences as a magical destination in its own right. ‘It’s not just the Maltings and the evocative Snape building complex, it’s the draw of this isolated location. It’s being able, for example, to walk out at a concert interval and view the wonderful landscape around, with its reed-beds and marshes.’
Weirdest concert halls: other converted breweries
Other beer-related venues featuring a classical music offering include the re-purposed Farnham Maltings in Surrey and the thoroughly modern DEYA brewery on the Lansdown Industrial Estate in Cheltenham – where the ‘DEYA Swamp’ performance space has hosted classical concerts for the Cheltenham Festival.
At the microscale, though, I love the idea that Peterhouse College in Cambridge recently renovated a small mid-16th-century brewhouse in the Master’s Garden as a practice facility and intimate concert venue. ‘It was being used as a dumping ground for all sorts of stuff,’ says Peterhouse director of music Simon Jackson. ‘During the redevelopment, chaff from the grain used in the brewing process was discovered in the overhead timbers. The fireplaces used for roasting the barley are still here.
London and industrial spaces: railway sheds, bridges and power stations
A modest example, then, of how classical music has progressively invaded industrial spaces – usually disused, but not always. There’s no better example in the UK than the Roundhouse in London’s Camden Town – ‘round’ because the building was once a LNWR engine shed housing a turntable for re-directing locos. Opened as a performance venue in 1964, the Roundhouse – with its edgy vibe – soon pulled in performers of contemporary classical repertoire.
Elsewhere in the capital, the Docklands Sinfonia orchestra has famously performed in the ‘bascule chambers’ containing the counterweights enabling London’s Tower Bridge to open. These brick ‘amphitheatres’ possess a cathedral-like acoustic. Meanwhile, Tate Modern – once Bankside Power Station – has hosted the occasional classical music offering. A blockbuster London Symphony Orchestra concert in 2018 of Stockhausen and Messiaen, conducted by Simon Rattle, occupied the building’s Turbine Hall. The public stood to listen and followed the music makers around different spaces. As one reviewer commented, ‘This was something different… music as an event.’ Iconic location + sense of event = a winning combination.
Outside the UK, a former gasworks in Amsterdam, the Gashouder Westergasfabriek, is an integral part of the cultural scene. Classical music is one item on the performance menu. And the Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra isn’t sniffy about performing in a gasworks. ‘The Gashouder offers a place where we can experiment with different concert formats,’ says the orchestra’s managing director Dominik Winterling. ‘We can present partly seated, partly standing experiences in an intimate yet industrial setting. Our musicians really enjoy the modern industrial Gashouder atmosphere.’
Weirdest concert halls: American underground spaces, from cisterns to catacombs
Time to go below ground in the US. The gigantic Buffalo Bayou Park Cistern – fashioned from concrete – used to provide drinking water for the population of Houston, Texas. The cistern’s swimmy acoustic has inspired musical creatives working in a variety of contemporary genres, often heard in the ‘Underground Sounds’ concert series.
The US provides other mind-boggling examples of the use of underground spaces. New York-based Andrew Ousley explores multiple ‘crypt, catacomb and cave’ locations beneath the city for his varied array of highly popular ‘Death of Classical’ concerts – an ironic title jibing, he says, at ‘classical music’s obsession with its imminent demise, which is ridiculous’. One prime location is the catacomb complex under Green-Wood Cemetery in Brooklyn. Spooky, but special.
Weirdest concert halls: caves and quarries
Then there’s Mammoth Cave in Kentucky. This natural phenomenon inspired composer-conductor Teddy Abrams to write a ‘theatrical-installation’ piece, Mammoth, for his Louisville Symphony Orchestra plus cellist Yo-Yo Ma and bass-baritone Davóne Tines. The 2023 performance in the cave was, says Abrams, ‘an occasion which will stay in the minds of those present for a lifetime. It was a deep spiritual experience, which surely is what musicians are in the business of providing. Many of those attending were newcomers to serious music, so you can imagine that some of them then sought out Yo-Yo Ma’s concerts in more traditional venues. The project attracted media attention, and that makes an orchestra more visible.’
Disused quarries have offered spectacular settings for music, very likely boasting decent acoustics. Famously, in 1926, violinist Jascha Heifetz concertised in a quarry on the Ein Harod kibbutz in the then Palestine. The Fertőrákos Quarry in northern Hungary has staged music events in the open air since the 1930s, having been ‘discovered’ by the composer-performer Ernő Dohnányi. These days concerts take place in excavated rooms, to guard against inclement weather.
Defying such meteorological concerns, the breathtakingly spectacular Dalhalla limestone quarry in south-central Sweden is the destination to end all destinations. This massive hole in the ground has been home to a host of rock concerts but also – happily – to José Carreras and the occasional opera, such as Puccini’s Turandot and Delibes’s Lakmé.
Open air venues
Other imaginative outdoor locations? There can rarely have been a more evocative example than the use of the beach at Aldeburgh in 2013 for performances of Benjamin Britten’s sea-swept Peter Grimes (inspired by local 19th century poet George Crabbe). ‘An entirely appropriate setting,’ observes Chris Hilton. ‘As Yehudi Menuhin said, “If wind and water could write music, it would sound like Ben’s.”’
Inland, this past June saw the London Symphony Orchestra give another of its open-air Trafalgar Square BMW Classics concerts, under the baton of Antonio Pappano – a massive commitment in terms of the necessary (waterproofed) staging and sound system. If the idea here is to make it as easy as possible to access serious music, there’s no such thing with the ‘Music on the Apuan Alps’ programme in Tuscany. This offer demands hiking to lofty locations where lunch and musical performances are served up.
Weirdest concert halls... it's all about imagination
And so we could go on... I’m dying to tell you more about Marc Folan’s musical Something in the Water, staged last year in Europe’s oldest surviving operating theatre, situated near London Bridge. Or the concerts put on by the effervescent Lizzie Holmes’s DEBUT outfit which, among other venues, regularly follow Brunel’s example by occupying an intimate space in the Thames Tunnel shaft. Oh, and those UK barns staging opera. Alas, no space. Readers will have their own suggestions of strange-but-true concert locations – do cascade them onto the editor’s desk.
However, the question underlying much of the above is: how much more important may imaginative settings for music making – and the creation of ‘events’ – be for performers in the future? Teddy Abrams takes the straightforward view that, ‘If concerts in the middle of nowhere are shown to work, let’s do more of them, as long as the practical needs of musicians and concertgoers are met. The more that orchestral players see the value for audiences, the more they’ll want to be involved.’
At the Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra, Dominik Winterling is of the same mind. ‘The Amsterdam gasworks is one of several venues to present our orchestra to different audiences outside of the Concertgebouw concert hall. For instance, our free season opener is always presented in a different outdoor location in the city of Amsterdam. We hope that experimenting with such concert experiences will allow new audiences to develop a relationship with the orchestra.’
