{"id":2391765,"date":"2026-04-27T18:42:59","date_gmt":"2026-04-27T18:42:59","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/?p=2391765"},"modified":"2026-04-27T18:42:59","modified_gmt":"2026-04-27T18:42:59","slug":"schwarzman-centre-opening-concerts-a-magnificent-new-monument-to-secular-culture-classical-music","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/schwarzman-centre-opening-concerts-a-magnificent-new-monument-to-secular-culture-classical-music\/","title":{"rendered":"Schwarzman Centre opening concerts \u2013 a magnificent new monument to secular culture | Classical music"},"content":{"rendered":"

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I<\/span>n 1676 London musician Thomas Mace proposed a bold idea. Instead of enduring the \u201cinconveniences of talking, crowding, sweating and blustering\u201d, audiences should be able to enjoy music in a dedicated space: a \u201cmusick room \u2026 convenient and fit to perform in\u201d. For the first time concert-going was open to anyone for the price of a ticket, though this hungry new audience had to wait until 1748 and the construction of Oxford\u2019s Holywell Music Room \u2013 Europe\u2019s oldest custom-built public concert hall \u2013 for the fulfilment of Mace\u2019s vision and a room of their own.<\/p>\n

Since then, concert halls have become a mirror to changing fashions, priorities and politics. Compare the gorgeous fantasy of the 19th-century\u2019s Royal Albert Hall to the sleek postwar functionality of the Royal Festival Hall. In Oxford the Holywell has since been joined by several others, though none without their issues \u2013 until now.<\/p>\n

Enter Blackstone founder Stephen A Schwarzman<\/a> and a \u00a3185m donation to create the Schwarzman Centre for the Humanities, a home not only for Oxford University\u2019s seven humanities faculties and new Institute for Ethics in AI, but also for theatres, a cinema, gallery space and the 500-seat Sohmen Concert Hall.<\/p>\n

<\/svg><\/span>Last supper style \u2026 Es Devlin and Nico Muhly\u2019s 360 Vessels in the Great Hall. <\/span> Photograph: Schwarzman Centre for the Humanities<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Tested, tweaked and soft-launched since last October, the building (described by chief operating officer Alexandra Vincent as \u201cnot an arts centre, not an academic building, but a hybrid\u201d), was opened to the public for the first time this weekend, welcoming 12,000 visitors, all curious to see \u2013 and hear \u2013 the result.<\/p>\n

The world\u2019s first Passivhaus concert venue<\/a>, meaning it passes rigorous energy efficiency standards, the wood-lined Sohmen plays a long game. The blanched sternness of the lecture hall is uppermost until the music starts, when acoustic consultants Arup prove their mettle.<\/p>\n

There\u2019s a haloed quality to sounds produced on this stage. The Scottish Ensemble\u2019s launch programme of Shostakovich\u2019s C minor Chamber Symphony and Tchaikovsky\u2019s Serenade for Strings proved this again and again. Performing from memory, 21 string players moved through the space in fluid, shifting constellations, melding \u00d6rjan Andersson\u2019s choreography with big, collective musical gestures that rang the space like a bell. Between the two works the ensemble drifted off, leaving leader Jonathan Morton alone, sketching out the strange, baroque arabesques of Nicola Matteis\u2019s Alia Fantasia: every husk of bow-on-string, every flicker of ornamentation, pinprick clear.<\/p>\n

The heart of the Schwarzman is the Great Hall \u2013 a galleried atrium crowned by an octagonal dome. A \u201cchoral installation\u201d \u2013 360 Vessels <\/em>\u2013 by artist Es Devlin and composer Nico Muhly \u2013 supplied the opening ceremony, welcoming an audience seated Last Supper-style at long curving tables, a clay pot in front of each. A simple idea \u2013 the shared drinking of tea to the soundtrack of a newly commissioned anthem \u2013 took on lofty, portentous proportions. Devlin became a secular priestess presiding over a banal parody of the Eucharist, while Steven Grahl conducted an underpowered, under-rehearsed Schola Cantorum in music that suggested the scattered choirs of Monteverdi\u2019s Venice, but with little of their echoing mystique. The Schwarzman is a magnificent new monument to secular culture but, when it comes to ritual, even AI can\u2019t quite fill the spiritual void.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

\u2018 The preceding article may include information circulated by third parties \u2019 <\/em><\/p>\n

\u2018 Some details of this article were extracted from the following source www.theguardian.com \u2019 <\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

In 1676 London musician Thomas Mace proposed a bold idea. Instead of enduring the \u201cinconveniences of talking, crowding, sweating and blustering\u201d, audiences should be able to enjoy music in a dedicated space: a \u201cmusick room \u2026 convenient and fit to perform in\u201d. For the first time concert-going was open to anyone for the price of […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":2391766,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"om_disable_all_campaigns":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"jnews-multi-image_gallery":[],"jnews_single_post":[],"jnews_primary_category":[],"jnews_social_meta":[],"footnotes":""},"categories":[25179],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2391765","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-music"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/04\/Schwarzman-Centre-opening-concerts-\u2013-a-magnificent-new-monument-to.jpg","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2391765","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2391765"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2391765\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2391767,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2391765\/revisions\/2391767"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/2391766"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2391765"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2391765"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2391765"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}