Review: Club K at the BIC
Written by Peter John Cooper
It takes guts for an artist with an international reputation to play in front of an uncertain audience in a less than perfect environment. How much more daring for a full orchestra of 80 and their star conductor to put their reputation on the line?
That is what local band the Bournemouth Symphony Orchestra (BSO) did last night in a club atmosphere in The Solent Hall at the BIC.
A standing and drinking audience gathered round black clothed tables with the usual club paraphernalia of glowsticks and streamers and stars. Giant illuminated sculptures like enormous fluorescent viruses hung from the ceiling. Everywhere there were day-glo hangings and lighting. DJ Gabriel Prokoviev was already weaving his magical mix using his strange battery of samples as the audience began to assemble. Their dress was a clue to the crossover success of the evening.
Here was hippy chic mingling with 90s disco and arty black. Nobody knew what to expect and that flouting of convention became part of the joy of the evening. Prokoviev’s soundscape began to thaw the atmosphere and by the time the band hit the stage we were ready to rock’n’roll. As the orchestra assembled he told us that all normal restrictions were off and we were to respond exactly as we wanted.
Kirill Karabits, the energetic new young conductor of the BSO bounded on to the podium in his red converse trainers and we were straight into Beethoven’s Coriolan Overture. The orchestra attacked it with gusto even if many of the members must have experienced a moment of trepidation. One of the high points of the evening was Mossolov’s “The Iron Foundry”. Prokoviev (the dj grandson of the great composer) introduced this as a precursor to techno and we could see what he meant. A pounding beat and big sound made this riveting, to say the least. The horns and kitchen department seemed to be having a field day with one of the latter deputed to pound out the beat on an enormous sheet of tin.
We all enjoyed Glinka’s “Ruslan and Ludmilla” taken at a rip roaring Slavonic pace. I even saw one of the front desk fiddles smiling as she played. Perhaps the highlight was a couple of pieces by Prokoviev’s granddad from his ballet “Romeo and Juliet”. Yes, I know we’ve heard it a thousand times but there was something new and exciting in being able to compare the bass sound of the tuba and trombones with the sound we got later from the bass cabs of the pa system. But it wasn’t all full on in the programme.
The orchestra managed some subtlety and dynamic variation in the suite from Katchachurian’s “Spartacus” and I could easily hear the harp cutting through the wash of sound. And as an encore what more could we want but the clap-along “Sabre Dance” by Gayane. And then straight from the orchestra back to dj Prokoviev and, later, Danny Rampling with an eclectic assortment of concert goers dancing in the vari-lights. So was the evening a success?
Well, from the point of view of the orchestra the acoustics weren’t brilliant and the hum of voices from the bar was slightly disconcerting. But for the audience this was magical. And once you’d got used to the ambience it was effective and rewarding. It was great to be able to listen in a relaxed way and even to turn to your neighbour and say, “I liked that bit” during the show. For the hardened concert-goer this required a different way of listening; not deep, solitary immersion but a general, social and sociable experience with big blocks of sound and aural effects.
Disappointments? Well, it would have been terrific if we could have gone one step further and actually had the orchestra mixing with the dj. I’d pay good money to see that. The possibilities of music that would work in these sort of conditions are endless – I’d like to hear John Adams, Vivaldi, even some Mozart and a lot more big eastern European sounds.
Altogether, a great evening and a chance for many of us to hear a great orchestra at full-bore for the first time. And, what’s more we can feel that the BSO are part of the local scene and actually belong to us as much as the rest of the world. As one lady heading for the bar was heard to say “Bloody good, eh?”
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