A fun and original idea – you can listen to a concert and star-gaze at the same time
Southbank Sinfonia brought a night filled with music and the cosmos to St John’s Smith Square, a beautiful church in Westminster. Titled The Night Sky, Southbank Sinfonia, conducted by Olivia Clarke, took us on an hour long journey through the stars above us, performing whimsical and moving pieces of music while images of the night sky were projected onto the ceiling of St John’s Smith Square.
It was out of the ordinary to enter a church and to see people lying down on the floor. But this was the best bit about The Night Sky; the orchestra was in the centre of the church, spaced out, and the audience members were sat in the gaps. Most of us laid down as soon as the performance began, having been given big cushions beforehand, which allowed us to get comfortable and to gain a good view of the the vaulted ceiling onto which images of the cosmos were being projected.
The projections included moving images, videos, and animations, taking us through a basic introduction to space and our solar system. Philosophers and scientists like Galileo and Plato were covered, adding a nice educational edge which kept the handful of kids in the audience impressively engaged. I enjoyed the audio clippings of Mike Massimo, a former NASA astronaut and a veteran of four spacewalks on the Hubble Space Telescope; his musings on space were deeply interesting. The images from the Hubble Telescope made the best projections and set against the performance from Southbank Sinfonia, it made for a moving experience. Pieces like Haydn’s “The Representation of Chaos” and Prokofiev’s “Spheres” were well matched to the projections and were at points really effective.
At the end of the performance, we see a projection of Earth from a satellite while listening to Mike Massimino talk about seeing our planet from space. “From up there I couldn’t imagine anything more beautiful, more perfect, than this planet. It really is a paradise. It’s beautiful, it’s fragile, it’s perfection”. Having time to think about the planet we live on was grounding, and my mind went towards thoughts of ecology and the ways in which we are damaging our climate and environment. I would have liked to have seen this possible ecological angle being emphasised more, as this is an inevitable consideration when thinking about anything to do with our planet and our place on it.
Check out all upcoming Southbank Sinfonia events here.