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Sir Nicholas Kenyon atop the Barbican Centre |
Complex vision – opening the Barbican to a wider audience
Former BBC Proms programmer
Sir Nicholas Kenyon is revelling in his role as head of the labyrinthine arts centre, writes Simon Wroe
HEAD and shoulders above Elgar, Purcell or the lush strains of Delius, tact was top billing during Sir Nicholas Kenyon’s 11-year tenure as programmer-in-chief of the BBC Proms.
When Princess Diana died he was prudent enough to remove John Adams’s A Short Ride in a Fast Machine from the programme, replacing it with Faure’s Requiem; similarly, the tragedy of 9/11 called for spirituals from Child of Our Time and the finale of Beethoven’s Ninth in place of end of season sing-alongs.
Most impressively of all perhaps, Kenyon, who has lived in Constantine Road, South End Green for the past 25 years, managed to walk the line between the pedantic demands of hardcore “prommers” and the wishes of the masses.
Nine months into his new post overseeing the Barbican, pragmatism remains the watchword. There are 119 entrances to the labyrinthine concrete complex which opened in 1982, and Kenyon is working on many more ways to draw the audience in.
While the new season still displays touches of his encyclopedic knowledge of classical music – accrued from going to “far too many concerts” as a music critic for The Times, The New Yorker, The Listener and Early Music Magazine, and subsequently controller of Radio 3 – Kenyon must now get his brain around everything from ballet and cinema to street art and Brazilian hip hop. For a man who knows a great deal, he has had a lot to learn.
“This was a fantastic opportunity to get involved in a whole range of other cultural things that I hadn’t experienced before,” he declares, seated in his cheerily industrial office complete with giant iron pillar. “I have to be more broad-minded than my own taste. I’ll have to start listening to what my children listen to.”
Besides the learning curve, it is also a step away from the BBC, which Kenyon joined as controller of Radio 3 in 1992 before moving on to the Proms. People who work at the BBC that long are often regarded as “lifers”, unable to move on even if they could. Kenyon – who once told an interviewer he “couldn’t think of a better job” than the Proms – found himself, perhaps understandably, in that bracket. So what happened?
“I could have very happily gone on doing the Proms for years longer. I was remarkably free at the BBC. The only check and balance as far the BBC is concerned is the audience, and the audience is incredibly supportive at the Proms,” he says. “But there wasn’t a lot of what you would call ‘creative control’… I’ve never regarded myself as a BBC person. I regarded myself as a music person. I never thought there would be the opportunity to go to something wider than the musical world.”
As a publicly funded body, the BBC is always ultimately at the beck of the taxpayer. The Barbican, while organised and owned by The City of London, has other funding streams, including private sector possibilities that Kenyon is keen to tap further. This year they received their first Arts Council grant: £250,000 to work on a contemporary music programme.
Budgetary limits still apply, but Kenyon seems buoyed by the “open-mindedness” and youthful diversity of his new pastures. “We’re not boxed in to a very small corner of the arts scene,” he says. “The programme should be as inclusive as possible”.
But the man who was knighted this year for his services to music and broadcasting is not about to put on anything “purely commercial” to draw the punters. He wants “distinctive, different and important” events but recognises the key lies in finding the balance “between artistic innovation and what will sell”.
His search for that elusive truth brought him to the back row of the Proms almost every night; while the audience watched the show he would be watching them for signs of approval or contempt. Despite his stature and his legions of underlings, Kenyon still finds people-watching the most accurate yardstick for programming.
There’s also the definite impression that Sir Nick is no longer part of the establishment. He talks of rebuilding the music education system which “the government allowed to be run down without putting anything in its place”, and how there are “almost too many” Schools and Families initiatives.
The Barbican is putting greater emphasis on education in the new season, with schools from Camden, Islington and Hackney in on the act.
“We all know how easy it is to take something away and how difficult it is to build it up again,” he says. “We’re thinking of this in a long-term sense that these people are our future audience.”
Nay-sayers have cited the proliferation of music and arts as the end of live events, but Kenyon disagrees: “The fact you can listen to Beethoven or Brazilian rap with equal ease – if you compare it to 100 years ago when people only heard what they heard in the streets, the concert hall or on their own piano – is quite frightening, a really big mental change.
“There are huge changes taking place, but they are changes in the way music is distributed. There is no lessening in people’s enthusiasm for the live event – that’s true of pop festivals and classical music.”
Kenyon’s dream for the Barbican to be “the best arts centre in the world”, no less, requires all his energy. Fortunately, his three children are grown up; he has shelved ambitions to write a book about Early Music History, probably until his retirement.
Oh, and there’s the small matter of his attic study at home, stacked from floor to ceiling with programmes and CDs. His wife considers it a seceded state and dares not set foot. Someone really needs to organise and digitalise them all.
Even in his distant retirement, it seems, Kenyon has no intention of resting on laurels.
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