Hello and welcome. I'm Gabriele Finaldi, the
Director of the National Gallery, and I'm speaking to you from
Trafalgar Square on the occasion of a very happy collaboration
between the National Gallery and the LPO, the London Philharmonic Orchestra.
Hello, I'm Timothy Walker. Up until last month,
I was the Chief Executive and Artistic Director of the London Philharmonic
Orchestra. Gabriele and I developed this project
in the months before I left, and after COVID-19 began. Today
we're in the National Gallery and we're very pleased to have the London
Philharmonic Orchestra with us, who are performing some trios and quartets,
and it's a pleasure to be back in the Gallery and have some music.
Music has a really strong association with
Western historic painting, and it's a pleasure to be able to tell the story of
our Collection, through music that's performed
either in conjunction to the paintings, whether from the same period,
or whether we focus on the themes in the paintings themselves.
Playing in lockdown has been really strange, and really forced us all to
get out of our comfort zones a bit. We rely so much on small visual cues
when we're performing and rehearsing, almost like in a conversation, you know,
if you can't read the room it's very hard
to know how to deal with people. And you know, using platforms like Zoom and
things to rehearse and talk about music is
one thing, but there's no comparison to being in the same place, at the same time,
like this. Performing to a remote audience is
slightly different from performing to a hall full of
people. Just, there's a different kind of pressure, you
know. Where in the hall, you can see the pressure,
you can see that the 2,000 people in the audience, or 5,000 people in the audience,
in the Albert Hall for example, but on Zoom or if you're performing
online, you don't see them, but you know they're
there, so it's kind of having someone on your shoulder almost.
It's a slightly different feeling.
I've never been in the Gallery when
it's been emptied of people, and in a way, even though we miss our
audience, I think these extraordinary paintings around us sort
of inspire us in a similar way as an audience would,
and especially keeping in mind how each piece relates to the time period
of the paintings we're going to show in this video, I think it's very interesting
and a really special experience for all of us.
Art and music sit so perfectly together.
For music to be performed in the National Gallery
is really the most natural thing in the world, and it has a long history, actually.
Perhaps the most famous episode of music
at the National Gallery is during the war years, when the Collection was taken
away for safe keeping to some slate mines
in North Wales. So no pictures left on the walls,
and instead, to provide cultural sustenance,
spiritual sustenance to the London public,
a series of concerts was organised at the National Gallery.
Myra Hess was a pianist who during WWII,
approached then-Director of the National Gallery, Kenneth Clark,
about performing music in the Gallery spaces, which were empty, as all of the
paintings were in storage in a safe location outside of London.
Clark was so pleased with the idea that the galleries would be used for the
enjoyment of beauty that he not only said yes, he proposed
that she put on a concert every single day.
The concerts ran for about six and a half years, well beyond the Second World War.
They have acquired a sort of mythical status for us,
because as the population of the city was taking
refuge at the time of bombings, and so on, the Gallery opened every single day,
weekday, and there was a lunchtime concert every
single weekday at the Gallery during that period. And
in a sense, it was music that carried us through
those war years, so the opportunity to do something
during the COVID closure, the opportunity to do something
with the London Philharmonic Orchestra, to bring music back into the Gallery,
to remember those years when music played such an important role here in
the centre of London for the London population,
it's been an extremely pleasing thing to do.