Tonight:
10°c
Secret loans totalling £61.6 billion to struggling banks Royal Bank of Scotland and HBOS revealed for the first time
More...
New Moon is nothing if not an international advertisement for the hungry virtues of virginity and young people can’t get enough of it
The Twilight Saga: New Moon
Theatre
A smart, prickly and rewarding view of sexual and emotional confusion
Cock
Restaurants
Kitchen W8 is a bargain for this area, if such sophistication is what you crave
Kitchen W8
Too long and drawn out but very entertaining with excellent special effects
This is a peculiar play and does not work for me. Some of it is very funny but there are real flaws
Alex has a strong powerful voice and was faultless, she is far better now than she was on the X-Factor
London,
Fiona Maddocks's rating
Reader rating
Description: Martin Baker conducts Monteverdi's Vespro Della Beata Vergine 1610, performed as part of the Southbank Centre's festival, Luigi Nono: Fragments Of Venice.
Phone: 0871663 2500
Trains: BR, Tube: Victoria 
, Tube / Bus: 11, 24, 148, 507, 211 
This was an event so surreal you could believe Magritte had a hand in its design. To launch the Southbank Centre's Nono festival, we heard not a note by the Italian modernist but instead a Renaissance choral masterpiece, performed in Westminster Cathedral.
Of course there's an explanation, of sorts. Nono was Venetian. Monteverdi wasn't, but he spent his best years in that city, in charge of music at San Marco where his 1610 Vespers may or may not have been performed. Nono's vast Prometeo, coming to the UK soon, was influenced by Monteverdi's spatial inventions.
So far, so woolly. This wouldn't matter had the performance, by Westminster Cathedral Choir and the New London Consort conducted by Martin Baker, been good. Yet it's hard to imagine a more ill-judged or slipshod account, which also failed to grasp the acoustic challenges of the reverberant 1903 building.
To suggest, as the programme note did, that St Mark's and Westminster are similar because they're cavernous and have mosaics is lazy and inaccurate. Architecturally they're virtual opposites. St Mark's is compact, with all the action concentrated at the centre. Westminster is open, with a long, wide nave and the focus at the east end. The impact on musical performance is crucial.
Elgar or Rachmaninov work well. But Monteverdi's delicate rhapsodies and antiphons are lost to the heavens unless you strengthen musical forces, as John Eliot Gardiner has done here in the past.
>One solution might be to perform mid-nave, so everyone could hear. Last night the sounds shuffled through this great building like a Mexican wave, arriving wan and etiolated instead of muscular, buoyant and joyful.
Details are correct at the time of publication - please check with venue before booking.
Sure there are innate acoustic challenges but that is not the fault of the performers, who from where I was sitting, admittedly at the front, were largely exemplary. Moreover most of the motets were sung from the pulpit - sited funnily enough in mid-nave. I am no music critic but I personally found it an exhilirating experience.
- Gbs, London
