“A new concert hall for London would cost £278m and should be built near St. Paul’s Cathedral on the site of the Museum of London, a six-month feasibility study has concluded,” reports Mark Brown in Wednesday’s (12/16) Guardian (United Kingdom). “The government said it would provide £5.5m to fund a full business case for the planned hall, which would be home to the London Symphony Orchestra (LSO) under the leadership of Sir Simon Rattle.… The report was commissioned in February by the chancellor, George Osborne, and the London mayor, Boris Johnson, to look into whether a world-class concert hall needed to be built, how much might it cost and where it could be located. It is widely agreed that London’s two main concert halls, at the Barbican and the Royal Festival Hall, are outshone by halls in Birmingham and Gateshead and European venues.… The 250-page report says [London] … is ‘at real risk of falling behind other major cities with the proliferation of outstanding new 21st-century halls in cities across the world threatening the capital’s current pre-eminence in the music industry.’ … The report proposes a timeline which would see the Centre for Music opening in September 2023.”
Posted December 16, 2015
