I Wanna Hold Your Hand - Beehives and Berio at the Festival Hall

By Julia Hudson 

I’m the only girl on this blogging team, so in this post I’m going to talk about toasters, cushions, vintage, and almost certainly fashion. Consider yourselves duly warned.

If you venture into any trendy retail establishment or hip cocktail bar, you will find a smorgasbord of “retro”. Gatsby-inspired beaded flapper dresses, Smeg fridges, beehives (not the buzzing kind), and endless looks back towards a bygone era. Vintage is in, and many trendsetters are rejecting progressive design in favour of authentic or faithfully reproduced pieces of history which are permeating our daily lives.

Last week, I went to the Royal Festival Hall for the eagerly-anticipated Sao Paolo Symphony Orchestra Brazilian-themed concert, conducted by Marin Alsop. The programme was close to Alsop’s heart, mentored as she was by Bernstein, who was in turn a close supporter of Guarnieri, and who commissioned Berio’s Sinfonia, which was performed with the Swingle Singers in the second half. Introducing the pieces with a friendly, collaborative air, Alsop seemed comfortable and the orchestra responded beautifully.

Mad Men's stylish Joan Holloway

As Nick Breckenfield mentions: “Born out of post-war austerity, and conceived from the very beginning as the only permanent fixture marking the 1951 Festival of Britain, the Royal Festival Hall was always set to become the capital’s – and therefore the country’s – main music venue.” Having undergone a multi-million pound restoration in recent years, the RFH still stands as “an astounding architectural statement” in the heart of the city. To be the venue for this kind of programming, surely, showed it at its most authentic – indeed, one could have stepped back in time. As Alsop said, “all we needed was the Beatles”, or, indeed, a Dualit kettle. Mad Men's stylish Joan Holloway

But, with our embrace (on this blog, and throughout much of the classical music world) of all things forward-looking and innovative, of music fused with technology and progressive thinking, was this concert dated, out of touch and (dare we say it) passé? Surprisingly, the music still had the power to shock, and shock it did – six of my neighbours had walked out by the end of the first movement of the Berio, with its vocal grunting and squeaking and constant referencing of other works. This, considering how much has passed in society since this music was conceived – Miley’s twerking, clearly, has nothing on this.

Where is the line, then, between dated and retro? Is it down to quality, authenticity, consistency? The young, beautiful, trendy incarnation of Swingles, though, were key, as was the vibrant orchestra. However, there is something about the past which unsettles my (Eighties) generation. To pull the girl card again, I’ve just started watching Mad Men, and am finding the flagrant sexism and disregard for female intelligence disturbing. I enjoy vintage clothing, music from bygone eras and am partial to the occasional beehive, but a “real” authenticity of values and belief systems doesn’t sit well with my contemporary ones.

So, where does this leave music?  Nick Breckenfield suggests that “there are derisory claims as to the Royal Festival Hall’s plain, even austere, functionality…[but that it is] just as much a product of its times as the spirit of hope that gave birth to the Festival of Britain.” Perhaps this is the key – we don’t have to disparage or dismiss more contemporary music, with its pared-down, Bauhaus-esque aesthetic, if we view Friday’s exciting and still powerful music as a product of its times. When one considers that Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring was written less than 40 years earlier, this suddenly isn’t so hard to do.

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