On Tuesday evening, the Killermont Street entrance of Glasgow Royal Concert Hall had the red carpet rolled out and flaming torches at the entrance. That perhaps makes the opening of the new home for the Royal Scottish National Orchestra sound rather more grand than it actually was. For although this was black tie occasion and the invited ladies and gentlemen were suitably glammed-up, and a glass of fizz was supplied on arrival, it would be hard to tar it with any sense of extravagance. The event was very carefully pitched and managed, with a feel of celebration but nothing that could attract accusations of prolifigacy. I suspect that precision engineering may come to be recognised as a hallmark of the orchestra’s new chief executive, Dr Krishna Thiagarajan.
Reading my colleague Michael Tumelty’s review, I suspect he’d have liked more music and fewer speeches, but he also recognised that they were an inevitable part of the event designed to express the organisation’s thanks to all those who had worked to fund-raise and create the new facility. As Scottish Government Culture Secretary Fiona Hyslop’s address pointed out, the move is much more than simply giving the musicians a weatherproof rehearsal facility to replace the old Henry Wood Hall, but includes hi-tech infrastructure for the orchestra – and other users – to communicate their world across Scotland and around the world, taking advantage of the interconnectedness of the 21st century. The possibilities are very exciting.
Rather more prosaically, there is an amusing Mexican stand-off going on about what we should call the wonderful new adaptable concert hall at the heart of this new development. The invitation to the event was to the “Grand Gala Launch of the new RSNO Centre” but the ticket issued on the day was for admittance to the “Grand Gala Launch of the New Auditorium and RSNO Centre at the Glasgow Royal Concert Hall”. Ms Hyslop clearly referred to the room in which we sat listening to the musicians and the Junior Chorus as the RSNO Centre, but Councillor Archie Graham, chair of Glasgow Life, the orchestra’s partners in running the building, pointedly called it the New Auditorium. This minor disagreement will be of little concern to those who work there or the audiences who will surely come to love the superb acoustic of the new smaller hall, which now gives the city a multiplex of performance spaces on the same site. For those of us writing about what goes on there, however, it needs to be resolved so that our readers know where we are talking about. Taking our lead from the Culture Secretary, and until it is renamed to honour some benefactor, the Herald arts department will be referring to the hall as the RSNO Centre. Plainly the name New Auditorium is cursed with built-in obsolescence, as it will only remain “new” for as long as anyone thinks it so. More seriously, the use of the orchestra’s name for the hall recognises the fact that it was the initiative and remarkable fundraising of the RSNO staff and supporters that brought the development into being, however much the city council contributed. Just as the Strathclyde Suite at the Glasgow Royal Concert Hall remembers the contribution the then regional authority made to the completion of the original building 25 years ago, so the name of the new venue must give credit where it is due.
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