New name, new look and, with the first impressions of good sound, palpable relief. Anticipation was high, the hall jam-packed: if this were the Bristol Beacon’s future, all would be well.
The £132m Colston Hall rebuild – involving the whole fabric of the place and some of its tarnished image – has taken five years. The Bristol Beacon, symbolic of hope, reopened almost three weeks ago with a busy programme. Yet, in the eyes of many, it was as an orchestral venue that it has ultimately to be judged. Bristol Youth Orchestra had given the first full orchestra performance, but the honour of launching the 2023/24 orchestral season fell to the hall’s orchestra-in-residence, the Bournemouth Symphony Orchestra under Kirill Karabits. The welcome they got was heartfelt and it’s an irony that, having established himself as such a popular figure with the Bristol audience, this is now the final year of Karabits’ tenure as their chief conductor. He seemed to be on fire on the podium here.
Such an occasion demanded celebratory fanfares. Mark-Anthony Turnage had been commissioned to provide the opener: Beacons – Fanfares for Orchestra, all bells and whistles, five percussionists and drum kit. At five and half minutes, its vibrant, jazzy warmth had the requisite feelgood factor, with the brass section making their presence felt not just in the flourishes but variously dipping in and out of the textures throughout and sounding well against a solo harp. More brazen fanfares came in Shostakovich’s Festive Overture, which Karabits took at a lick – and made of it a much more convincing piece than it actually is.
Sunwook Kim was the pianist in Beethoven’s Emperor Concerto and, after a somewhat ragged start, there was a great exuberance about this performance, with Kim’s technical fluency and passagework glittering bright. It was the central Adagio that gave a better sense of the hall’s acoustic properties: the veiled quality of the muted strings carrying beautifully and, with Karabits shaping tonal colours to match the piano’s melodic line, the mutual sympathy of soloist and conductor was clearly apparent.
Stravinsky’s The Rite of Spring was the metaphorical fanfare that in 1913 heralded a new musical era – an appropriate message for this hall 110 years on. Karabits brought to it all the necessary raw primal energy, with the brass happily ablaze, but, again, what was most revealing was the emergence of fine detail in Stravinsky’s woodwind writing, not just Tammy Thorn’s reedy bassoon melody but the very particular timbres of the E flat clarinet, cor anglais and alto flute. The combination of sinister atmosphere and the positively explosive power of the sacrificial ritual was powerful.
