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Music for
Grown-Ups Newsletter
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07/05/2009 King’s College Cambridge – another venue I’ll be avoiding
Like millions of others, I treasure the unofficial start of a UK Xmas, carols from King’s College Cambridge. Broadcast every year at dusk on Xmas Eve on TV and on Xmas Day on Radio 3, the carol service gets to the heart of Xmas. I’m no Christian, but feel the need around the winter solstice to elevate spiritual values above the mundane and the commercial. The carol concert always helps. It’s such beautiful music. I’ve always fancied a gig at King’s, so when I got the chance to book Bach’s St John Passion before Easter, I grabbed it. I’ve rarely had such high expectations for a concert. But boy, how my hopes were dashed! It was such a miserable gig that I gave up at the interval and drove home. Why? Almost incredibly, the acoustics were poor - muddy and boomy. So poor that I couldn’t tell you how good or bad the performances were. Our seats – towards the rear of the chapel, about 30 yards from the stage – afforded a view of, er, very little. The flat floor meant we could only see the head and shoulders of the back row of the choir and the conductor’s back, but not a single musician or solo singer. And, having bought a programme to follow the words, I was unable to read it – after the Sun had set, there was insufficient light in the chapel to illuminate the text. It was a dispiriting, desperately disappointing evening. King’s College Chapel is an achingly beautiful building but, if my experience is typical, it’s not suitable as a music venue.
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