James Larter
World Heart Beat Embassy Gardens, Nine Elms, London
Bournemouth Symphony Orchestra/Karabits
Lighthouse, Poole
In 2018, Donald Trump, then American president, called the site of the new US Embassy, in London’s regenerated Battersea power station area, a “lousy location”. Today the buildings are established, trees planted, restaurants thriving. The transparent “sky pool”, bridging two high buildings, is the epitome of a certain sort of extreme glamour Trump might fancy. Downsides exist, all too easy to ignore. The term “poor doors” sums up the reality for those who live in adjacent social housing but cannot access the luxury perks on view from their windows. Could music, at least in part, be an answer?
A small music charity next door to the US Embassy, called World Heart Beat, is taking on the Goliath of this multibillion-pound commercial development and trying to make change. Just over a year after opening its doors, its secret needs sharing. The paradox of cutting music education in children’s critical early years, then discovering that it aids brain function later in life, hardly needs spelling out. If it takes research, such at last week’s from the University of Exeter, to attract headlines, so be it. The activities of World Heart Beat only become more timely and vital. This enterprise could be a blueprint for every comparable urban community.
Having beaten a field of 41 other organisations to become the area’s “cultural anchor”, the charity has taken over a unit at the base of a tower block that might otherwise have ended up as another supermarket. After a bargain £3.6m revamp, it consists of an intimate concert hall, studio, cafe and music academy with practice rooms. An industry-standard sound system makes it a draw for professional recordings. This helps fund the academy, which supports 440 deprived young people from low income, recent migrant and refugee families. The jazz composer-pianist Julian Joseph is a patron.
Around half the students attend free, helped by bursaries and instrument loans. World Heart Beat’s founder and artistic director, Sahana Gero, told me that some teenagers who avoid school are nonetheless willing to commit to the academy, regarding it as a safe place, whether to learn an instrument or to train in any aspect of music performance, including lighting and broadcast technology. (Since 1 in 5 jobs in London are reportedly in the creative economy, this opportunity may prove invaluable.)
The venue’s public face is a 200-capacity auditorium with a lively concert series (from Cuban jazz to piano recital to funk, played by established performers and rising stars). Last weekend the young percussionist-composer James Larter gave a virtuosic solo programme of his own works – among them Goroka, with electronics, inspired by the sounds and colours of Papua New Guinea – and pieces by Michael Gordon, Kevin Volans and Astor Piazzolla. A fugue from a JS Bach violin suite sounded, unbelievably, tailor-made for sticks and marimba. So too did Debussy’s Clair de lune.
How did Larter, whose teachers include the great solo percussionist Colin Currie, get the gig? He was spotted by Gero when he came to World Heart Beat to play on a recording session for a new album by Boris Grebenshchikov, “father” of Russian rock music (you already knew that), with Chris Kimsey, one-time Rolling Stones co-producer and a Battersea boy. This is the kind of priceless cultural legacy that gives pride to those five- to 25-year-old local people who walk through the doors as equals.
Gero’s task now is to find £600,000 to keep going until August. World Heart Beat’s annual budget of £1.4m for now relies heavily on donations. The Arts Council provides only 6%. Last week the charity launched a new membership scheme. Starting at £25 a year, it’s a way that those of us who benefited from free music lessons can give directly back.
In the south and south-west of the country, covering an area of 10,000 square miles with its own economic polarities, Bournemouth Symphony Orchestra has the biggest geographical remit of any UK orchestra. Its Participate programme (including the Recovery Orchestra in partnership with Bristol Drugs Project, dementia-friendly cake concerts, care home performances and work in schools) is of equal importance to an imaginative concert life. Under its popular chief conductor, the Ukrainian Kirill Karabits, the BSO’s longstanding Voices from the East series has been transformative for all. Karabits has coaxed BSO loyals to listen to a range of new repertoire from Armenia, Azerbaijan, Turkmenistan and elsewhere: safe to say, much of it unknown to other UK audiences. His 15-year tenure ends this summer after concerts in Poole, London’s Southbank (19 May) and Bristol Beacon (7 June), when he becomes conductor emeritus.
On Wednesday, at the Lighthouse, Poole, the BSO was joined by star violinist Vadim Gluzman for the Violin Concerto No 1, “Distant Light” (1997) by the Latvian composer Pēteris Vasks. Ranging from hymn-like elegy to dissonance to optimism, it propels the soloist to sonic extremes but always reins it back to eloquent, middle-voiced lyricism, underpinned by orchestral strings in rich harmonies. In addition to Mozart’s Serenade (K388 in C minor), crisply played by a wind octet, the whole orchestra – 90-strong – assembled for Shostakovich’s last symphony, No 15 (1972).
With its clinical medical beeps (on glockenspiel, woodblock and castanet), its startling snatches of Rossini and Wagner and its chamber-like use of solo instruments, this is Shostakovich at his most enigmatic: mechanical and comic, desperate and lamenting, it is all these, as this superb performance revealed. Whoever replaces Karabits – announcement expected in the summer – will inherit an orchestra brimming with style and guts.
Star ratings (out of five)
James Larter ★★★★
Bournemouth Symphony Orchestra/Karabits ★★★★★
