Phone recording by audience members will still be encouraged by one of Britain’s leading orchestras despite a performer backlash as it vowed to continue challenging the “conventions of the concert hall”.
The City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra said audiences would be allowed to film despite a high-profile tenor, Ian Bostridge, stopping mid-performance at its concert hall last month to lambast audience members who had done so.
Emma Stenning, the orchestra’s chief executive, said that as orchestras sought the holy grail of “younger people … We can’t expect them to come [under] the old rules”.
“We need to be able to have a conversation about the opportunity of relaxing some of the traditions of the concert hall just to see that they [young audiences] get to us,” Stenning said.
“For me innovation is the key and that is sometimes something that gets a bit stuck within the classical world. There is not another business where innovation is not absolutely celebrated, prized and championed.”
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Stenning was speaking as she unveiled the orchestra’s new season, which includes performances by the cellist Sheku Kanneh-Mason, the pianist and composer Sir Stephen Hough, the tenor Nicky Spence and the return after a 20-year absence of its former principal guest conductor, Sir Mark Elder.
She said the artists all knew the orchestra’s audience recording policy, which was introduced a year before her appointment in 2023, adding: “If someone is super-uncomfortable then we won’t do it.”
It was after the third song in Benjamin Britten’s Les Illuminations at the city’s Symphony Hall on April 17 that Bostridge stopped his performance after becoming “distracted” by at least two people filming.
The tenor subsequently said he was unaware of the orchestra policy, which he thought “inappropriate”.
“It is a live performance and you are trying to keep your own concentration to convey something that is quite complex musically,” he told the BBC. “You are trying to connect with the people and there is so much in the news these days about how we are too distracted by phones and how can we escape.”
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Stenning, who is due to meet Bostridge this month, said that at the performance “a few audience members were actually reading the translation of the French on their digital programme which could be downloaded on their phones as part of our green policy”.
She said the orchestra was introducing a “dark mode” on its website which would prevent any glare when looking at the digital programme, adding that it would continue to challenge convention.
Stenning said there had been discussions about introducing “quiet carriages” in the concert hall, akin to those on trains, where phones were not allowed. There were other debates “about the conventions of the concert hall”, including the age-old question of when to applaud.
“It is just about us playing around with these rules a bit and finding a way in which people can feel entirely relaxed and at home in the concert space,” she said. “We have to be honest and recognise that the brilliant audience that most regularly joins us at Symphony Hall represents only part of this incredibly diverse musical city.”
The orchestra, like all of Birmingham’s big arts organisations, is dealing with the pending withdrawal of its entire £630,000 grant from the city’s bankrupt council while it — like classical music organisations across Britain — is coping with real terms cuts in its Arts Council England grants.
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The funding body has repeatedly warned over the past two years that they need to diversify and start attracting new audiences.
As part of its drive to attract new audiences the Birmingham orchestra is hosting a CBSO in the City week in August when its members will present a series of free performances at locations including West Bromwich Albion’s football ground, the Bullring shopping centre and local pubs.
Distractions and gimmicks seem the main selling points
Encouraging audiences to film live classical music performances on their mobile phones raises all sorts of difficult issues (Richard Morrison writes). This is irrespective of whether or not it attracts younger audiences (unproven) or irritates existing ones (very much the case, to judge from the backlash from many loyal CBSO punters). Much classical music is still in copyright, for instance. That was certainly the case with Britten’s Les Illuminations, which Ian Bostridge was singing when being filmed. Were the rights owners aware that dozens of recordings were being made and subsequently posted on the internet?
And is it fair, or even legal, for a soloist to be pressured, as part of his or her contract, into agreeing to this ad hoc filming — or, as Bostridge claims, not to be told at all? Won’t world-class classical musicians — many of whom take their artform very seriously indeed and expect audiences to do the same — refuse to appear in places such as Birmingham where distractions and gimmicks now seem to be the main selling point?
The argument will be made, of course, that this sort of free-for-all filming goes on all the time at pop concerts, so why should classical concerts be sacrosanct? But that’s to equate two completely different aesthetic worlds. People attending the former expect mega-decibels music, megawatt visuals and audience singalongs, whereas the hallmarks of many classical music concerts are the three Cs: calm, concentration and communion with your inner self. Hard to see how the two can coexist at the same events.
