Hastings Philharmonic Orchestra – under artistic director and principal conductor Marcio da Silva – maintains its tradition of holding the first orchestral concert of the season at the White Rock Theatre, where HPO is the orchestra in residence.
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00:00Good afternoon, my name is Phil Hewitt, Group Arts Editor at Sussex Newspaper. It's lovely
00:06to speak to Marcio da Silva, who is the Artistic Director of Hastings Philharmonic Orchestra,
00:11and you are doing a really exciting thing. You are trying, through the orchestra, to
00:15change culture, aren't you? To change the culture where people don't tend to go to classical
00:20concerts. How are you doing that? How can you take that?
00:24We have this new offer that started last year called Pay What You Can, which is hard
00:30to convince people that it actually means pay what you can. And people are starting
00:36to understand and try it out. What we would like is for more people to simply try classical
00:42music and see if they like it, or even if they don't like it the first time, they might
00:46like it next time.
00:47And we should just say that applies to all the concerts apart from the white rock ones.
00:52Exactly.
00:54So Pay What You Can is not saying that people can't afford, it's just trying to entice
00:58them in because they don't have that habit.
01:00Absolutely.
01:01How does that work?
01:03It's really to remove any barriers, or if I'm quite honest, excuses for anyone who might
01:10enjoy a night out with classical music. I feel that classical music can often be daunting,
01:19like you go to a concert, you don't know what you have to dress, who you're going to see,
01:23if you're going to see any of your friends there. So it's really trying to open up our
01:31audience pool and really mix the audience in a way that you see people from everywhere.
01:37Where have those barriers come from? You think of opera, which is absolutely the people's
01:43art form, wasn't it a few hundred years ago, but is now so enclosed in its own traditions
01:49that it is...
01:50I think...
01:51Where have the barriers come from?
01:53I think, unfortunately, it has to do with exposure. So if people don't see classical
01:57music from an early age, they just won't have that habit of listening to it. And I'm one
02:03of those people who I'm somewhat critical of some of the development work that groups
02:09do with going to schools, because I believe that if you go to a school with two musicians,
02:16that's great. So they're going to listen to the violin or the bassoon or whatever. Children
02:21are going to listen to how these instruments sound like, but they're not going to experience
02:25what it is to listen to classical music in a concert hall, which is actually what we
02:30want them to do. We don't necessarily want for every child in the world to become a musician.
02:34There are already plenty of musicians, but they could play it for fun, etc. But it doesn't
02:40necessarily... You see even children that might learn the violin at school, but they
02:45don't develop the habit of going to concerts. And that's what really we would like for them
02:49to do, because the more you go, the more you experience it, the more you will understand
02:53it.
02:54So what is it that's on offer? What makes the experience of a classical concert so fantastic?
03:01Do you think?
03:02I think it varies from person to person. So for me, as a performer myself, when I go to
03:08classical music concert, I tend to analyse things and listen to things in a way that
03:13someone else might not. But I think that the richness of the culture, the history,
03:19and also simply the physical experience of sitting down and listening to an orchestra
03:24with 40 to 80 people playing, it's something very, very unique that you don't get anywhere
03:29else. You don't go to a popular music concert with 70 people on stage. It just doesn't happen.
03:38I think with little by little, people will start to open to the experience and it just
03:43becomes a transformative experience, I think.
03:45Fantastic. Well, you're a brilliant ambassador for it. Lovely to speak to you and good luck
03:50with all the efforts to expand. Thank you. Good to talk to you.
03:53Thank you so much. Thank you. So keep in touch then. Thanks a lot. Bye.