85425 LCMS Newsletter

Members’ Voices rarely miss.” My great-uncle’s reply hasn’t trip to Red Lion Square, a random selection of LCMS Strategy Planning survived, but it’s very likely that he did attend the miniature scores of well-known works in the back concerts during his years as editor of the Jewish of the car. The interior of Conway Hall would not I have been a trustee of LCMS for a Three Generations Chronicle in the early 1930s. In his very modest have changed very much since the late 1950s, and year. When I joined the Board I was childhood home in Stoke-on-Trent at the turn of in my adolescent mind its earnest, secular, 1920s asked to look strategically at how we the century music would only have come from the aesthetic became indissoluble from the experience photo: © John Sturrock photo: © John are set up and how we operate. I have wireless and occasional concerts, so it isn’t difficult of listening to chamber music – the distinctive CHAMBER MUSIC NOTES helped others in a similar exercise in to imagine the influence of the Sunday concerts in wood-panelling, the fringed lamp casting a circle of the past, and my way of doing this is the formation of a lifelong music-lover. light on the performers, and the large inscription of to take time, talk to as many people This makes me the third generation of my ‘To Thine Own Self Be True’ forming a constant as I can, and try to understand the family for whom the concerts have been part of our backdrop. The audience, although not entirely ISSUE 9WINTER/SPRING2014 organisation in depth. It’s a slow lives. None of us are “executants” but all of us, of made up of a certain Bloomsbury intellectual type business, but I’m beginning to feel whom I am the only one to have grown up in dressed like Michael Foot at the Cenotaph in 1981, TheLCMS that I have got to grips with LCMS as a living organisation. London, have taken something from the wealth of had a similar earnest, secular air about it. I would All organisations have to change. musical life in London, and from the Sunday observe a certain thinning of listeners in the Those that try to stand still, in my experience, gradually – Concerts, which introduced audiences to serious direction of the pub next door during the more sometimes not so gradually – wither away. Those that try to shrink music without great ceremoniousness or expense. avant garde or obscure works in the programme, their activities also often tend to shrink out of existence. So, my My parents’ copy of ‘The Story of A Thousand returning for the more familiar piece with which the task is to help the Board identify how LCMS can grow and how it Concerts’, published by the South Place Ethical concert usually ended. Chamber music had less of Newsletter Our Neighbours: needs to change. Society in 1927, explains: the easy tuneful or participatory appeal than the Kings Cross Update There are two ways to change – dramatically or incrementally. “The concerts were called the South Place Messiah and Mozart Requiem we encountered at Sunday Popular Concerts, but why the word school, or the Bach instrumental works and When you pass the former Central St. There is still much to be done, of Dramatic change is hard to manage and you need a reason for it, “Popular” was introduced into the title must have Beethoven piano sonatas my more proficient Martin’s (University of the Arts) building in course, but redevelopment is moving usually because the organisation is in serious decline. That is been a cause of bewilderment to many. ... [It] contemporaries played, and it was a long time Holborn, there is a blue plaque fast, with Kings Cross Energy Centre certainly not the case with LCMS. It is a well-established, well- was, in fact, a misnomer, for the music has always before I really chose to listen to the Sunday recognising the architect William Lethaby, scheduled to start generating electricity respected charity with good artistic values and a loyal audience. On 2 April 1957 my father, Harold Rich, then in his been of the most consistently unpopular character. concert programme. the first principal of the school (1896- as part of the area’s planned energy Another reason, though, for dramatic change comes when an early 30s and an economics graduate working in opportunity arises that cannot be resisted. That presented itself to It must also be remembered that when the All this is a long way in time and place from Welcome! 1911). The university moved in September infrastructure. The Great Northern Hotel the motor industry, wrote to his uncle in LCMS with the opportunity to move from Conway Hall to Kings concerts were first commenced public taste was all Kings Place, where the LCMS and the Sunday 2011 to its new site in the Kings Cross of 1854 is open, and the Arthouse Johannesburg. My parents were newly engaged, Place, and we can see that this has, overall, been very beneficial for the lighter forms of music, and that actually concerts now flourish. It is a short walk from my Looking over the articles in our Newsletter Development next to Kings Place, but the complex welcomed its first residents in and my father wanted to tell his uncle something although not without its issues. LCMS is a small charity with only South Place did a vast amount of spade work in home, and far from being the child amongst older always reminds me of the importance to name lives on in the new Lethaby Gallery, 2013, offering modern amenities as well about his wife-to-be. My mother, Dina Kafka, who one part-time paid person. At Conway Hall, it was a relatively creating an appreciative audience for chamber people, I am an inconspicuous middle-aged woman providing a link between old and new. as tranquil walks to Regent’s Park and had come to live in London in the 1950s, had been LCMS of the cooperation and support we straight-forward exercise in programme-planning and hall-booking. music.” in the audience, happy to hear both performers of And this is a feature of the whole Islington. By 2016 it is estimated that up born in Prague, a city she had left for Denmark as receive from our partners. As both musicians At Kings Place we work in partnership with a complex professional My parents kept no programmes from the late breathtaking skill and longevity such as Levon development, a feeling of using old to 30,000 people will be studying, living a refugee at the age of 15 in 1939. set-up, and what we do has to mesh with the Kings Place 1950s, but they would have heard performers such Chilingirian, and the enthusiastic and talented and their audiences know, playing chamber structures for new uses. and working at Kings Cross. My father wrote: “[Dina] shares my passion for activities. We do benefit hugely from the Kings Place professionals, as the Aeolian String Quartet and Dennis Brain younger ensembles promoted by the LCMS. I hope music well entails more than just musical Although much of the site is still There are two gardens of interest: chamber music – alas, we are both listeners, not but they are themselves hard-pressed and there are limits to what Wind Ensemble, before Dennis Brain’s early death that the next generation of our family will still be under construction, there are clear the Skip Garden, which produces executants. I imagine that when you lived in skills. It is no less true that the promotion of we can ask of them. Bloomsbury you were familiar with the South Place in an accident later in 1957. In the late 1960s and listening to them with pleasure in years to come. chamber-music concerts requires multiple routeways around the area (including vegetables and herbs for local outlets, So, it is clear that for LCMS to be able to take advantage of all Sunday Concerts at the Conway Hall. These we 1970s we would often make an impromptu Sunday “Eat Street”!), and it is well worth including their own café; and Handyside that Kings Place can offer – including a great hall, a great skills, high among them the ability to work strolling around the campus to see the Gardens, open in December 2013, a marketing team and a wide potential clientele – we need ourselves in harmony with one’s partners. In the great progress being made. A good newly planted area to complement the to become more professional and, perhaps, entrepreneurial. At the ‘Getting to Know You’ column of Chamber place to start is the Viewing Platform, ambitious tree programme. There is a same time, we don’t want to lose the “family” atmosphere that I Behind the Scenes Music Notes we always highlight the which gives a panoramic view of the display of plant illustrations indoors on feel is a distinctive feature of our concerts. We also want to Books sweep of steps leading from the canal to easels and another outside on a shiny maintain our adventurous artistic policy while building our contributions to LCMS of our multi-talented My journey with LCMS started in 2008, when the Granary Square on one side, and the metallic ‘mirror wall’ adjacent to the plot, audiences. That has to be seen in the context of ever-increasing ‘Time Will Tell’ by Donald Greig. Thames River Press. Kings Place partners. This issue, which station development on the other.

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