noisenights: A hit with all kinds

‘This concert is going to have a lot of French music and also French film music, which I especially love’. One of the most highly internationally acclaimed young concert and opera artists of our time gives us a clue about her programme for an upcoming event on 17 September – but Egyptian soprano Fatma Said will not be performing it in a concert hall. She will be appearing at the Lafayette auditorium in London’s Kings Cross which bills its entertainments as ‘Live music, street food and drinks – all under one roof’. It will be her second appearance at one of the groundbreaking events organised by through the noise – the radical brainchild of co-founders and directors Jack Bazalgette and Jack Crozier in which greatly in-demand young classical artists come to crowd-funded venues and clubs to perform as part of evenings that also include sets of jazz, afro-beat and funk. The virtuoso Fatma Said triumphed with the audience for her first through the noise event at the Oslo Hackney earlier this year, singing music she had recorded last year for her enormously successful Warner Classics album Kaleidoscope. This was the launch of an on-going partnership between Warner Classics and through the noise which had been inspired by the success of an earlier event featuring another brilliant young Warner Classics artist, the cellist Abel Selaocoe.

The partnership was conceived jointly by the through the noise founders and the director of Warner Classics UK, Sean Michael Gross, who tells us: ‘It stems from a mutual desire to bring classical music and some of today’s most exciting artists to a broad and engaged new audience of music lovers. I first met Jack and Jack after attending noisenight three, a show at the Jago that featured our then new-signing Abel Selaocoe, followed by an Afro-funk and Afro-jazz DJ set. Aside from the sheer force of nature that is Abel, what made such a big impression on me that night was the eclectic mix of people who came to the gig, how they responded as enthusiastically to his Bach as to his African-inspired original compositions and how the event felt free of any of the conventions and stigmas that sometimes, however fairly or unfairly, accompany performances at more traditional venues. Sensing they were onto something, I approached the Jacks about partnering with us at Warner Classics and offered to support their efforts in any way I could. Our first venture was co-producing an album launch concert for Fatma Said’s latest recording, Kaleidoscope. It was an amazing experience watching a sold-out crowd in a Hackney railway arch fall completely silent from the moment Fatma sang her first note. Her compelling stage presence and sheer vocal beauty just blew everyone away. The collaboration just grew organically from there, and the wonderful classical guitarist Thibaut Garcia is our third artist to perform in the partnership.’

'That I could be 100% free in what I wanted to say was the first attraction when I was offered this possibility.' ©through the noise

It is vital to state that through the noise has nothing to do with cross-over and nothing whatsoever to do with ‘dumbing down’. Bazalgette explains that: ‘It has been born out of an idealistic vision of how we would like to see the classical music scene expand and develop its audiences without compromising any of the music making. My background is a die-hard classical music concertgoer and performer and I love going to concert halls and opera houses. I am not at all a person who wants to tear anything up – instead through the noise has been conceived to add to the existing scenario and augment the current offering so that the very finest classical artists can be experienced by people who otherwise wouldn’t have any contact with them. We strongly care about great classical music and great classical performers being introduced to new audiences in their own familiar settings where the experience can come to life for them in the fullest possible way – so places where they feel they can emotionally connect with what is happening and, importantly, where the artists feel they can likewise connect with their new audience. When Fatma Said appeared at her first event, I think it is fair to say that both she and the audience were blown away by each other – it was inspiring to see and hear the warmth and excitement of everyone interacting there’.

For Fatma Said this has been a profoundly rewarding discovery that reverberates with her strongly-felt ideals. She had already been highly extolled in an eclectic range of musical genres, and yet, as she explains, the invitation from through the noise was something appealingly new.

‘They told me, “Just do what you want.” Now nowhere else says that to me! That I could be 100% free in what I wanted to say was the first attraction when I was offered this possibility. But then what surprised me and what I didn’t see coming was the whole setting and the wonderful interaction with the audience. First of all, there are no chairs – everyone is standing all the time – so the atmosphere is like it is at a pop concert where the audience always stands informally, and I love that. I would say the average age group is between around 18 and 40, and these are not people who go to opera houses and concert halls, so the fact that I could perform in front of them meant a lot to me. For classical music’s future I think it is really important that an initiative like through the noise should take place more and more because it gives the opportunity for the artist to go to the places where young people are – and that is how we can nurture this generation’s love of classical music. If we don’t reach out to them, they will have zero interest in coming to our concerts – but if we go to them in their places instead of trying to devise ways of bringing them to our concerts, then they are going to become our new audience later on.

Pianist Harry Baker, who specialises in improvising jazz, classical and new-music, joined Fatma Said for her first noisenight earlier this year ©through the noise

‘I say this with confidence because already I have been so delighted with the result that we had at the previous through the noise event that I participated in. I sang pieces from my two Warner Classics albums, and when I told them that one song was by Fauré they were saying, “we would never have imagined this is classical music – this is very beautiful.” All through the set they were very attentive, and something happened that meant a lot to me: in the way they reacted, they treated me like a pop singer – so when I sang something that resonated with them, in the middle of the song they already started talking about it to each other. Spontaneously they were responding with freedom to what they heard, and I could see that the music was affecting them: they were expressing what moved them in the song while I was singing it, and this creates a beautiful exchange of energy and emotions between the performer and the audience, which I really love.

‘To me, this is important as a sign of a change that is invaluable for classical music. Organisers of classical music concerts have been concerned about trying to make them appeal more to younger audiences today, and rightly so because altogether audiences have been changing a lot in their ways in recent times – which is inevitable as years and generations go by and peoples’ ways change. The new environment for classical music provided by through the noise has proved to be a watershed in my view, and it reminded me a little bit of performances of Arabic music in my country, when audiences would freely applaud in the middle of the song and immediately express their feelings about it and about the singer – sometimes they would want a repeat, and then the singer would interpret it differently. Of course, I am not saying that it should always be like this, as we absolutely must continue to have concert halls and opera houses – that is crucially important – but with through the noise we have now found that classical music can also be a great success in this very different kind of location with a new wholly different audience, and that is so vital for the future.’

Indeed, more vital now than ever before for classical music. And with young artists of the stature of Fatma Said, Abel Selaocoe, and Thibaut Garcia as spear-headers, through the noise is offering the most inspiring possible opportunity for that future. ​