Music in the heart of the city: Sam McShane joins Kings Place

Early this year, when Sam McShane was Creative Director at Manchester Camerata, she came to Kings Place to discuss a possible performance by the ensemble. It was a routine meeting, but what McShane hadn’t been expecting was an email from Peter Millican, Kings Place’s founder, which said “I’d like to have a chat while you’re here”. Fast forward to 20th May this year, when McShane entered Kings Place as its new Artistic Director. It’s been something of a whirlwind, and she is buzzing with excitement.

Before Manchester, McShane had cut her programming teeth in Scotland, first with RSNO and then with the Royal Conservatoire of Scotland. London has been quite a change. “In the first few weeks, I was thinking ‘it’s fine, you know, take it in your stride’. And then, honestly, after about a month, it hit me. The number of things that are happening in London is so overwhelming, and as a new artistic director, you feel a responsibility to go to everything that you possibly can. In the first few weeks, I’d be accepting invites to everything, and then I’d look at my diary and realise that I’m never at home!”

That effect is amplified by the omnivorous nature of Kings Place’s programming, which encompasses spoken word, jazz and folk as well as various formats of classical music. Trying to sell classical to folkies and vice versa may sound like a nightmare, but McShane thinks it feels natural in today’s world. “In the short time I’ve been here, some of the best gigs that I’ve seen at Kings Place here have been collaborations intersecting classical and folk, or classical and jazz. 

“Having worked at a conservatoire, I can see a definite change in the approach to classical from young musicians: it hasn’t changed completely yet, but the tendency is now to have more flexibility in terms of who you can collaborate with. For example, we’re seeing Donald Grant, who’s here in September: he’s a classical violinist, but his roots and his home are back in the north of Scotland, so we’re seeing him fuse both of those worlds together. That’s something really exciting in terms of the artist’s perspective.” Also in the context of the current “Scotland Unwrapped” series, she mentions a wonderful collaboration between guitarist Sean Shibe and folk/traditional fiddle player Aidan O’Rourke.

Crossover has its risks, of course: “when you merge genres together, there’s the risk of falling into the gap between the two genres. We have spoken a lot internally about how, for instance, we could encourage more of the jazz audience to come to classical concerts. It’s always been a massive discussion in classical music: how do we bring in a new audience? No-one wants to force feed people things that they don’t want, but we can still encourage people to try something new.”

For many programmers, “new classical music” fits squarely into the category of “force feeding people things they don’t want”. McShane thinks the opposite, voicing the intent to significantly increase the commissioning of new work. So what, I ask, is the secret sauce for selling contemporary classical to a London audience?

“For so much of the classical world, and the change that we’re all going through trying to find new audiences, is about how we reach, present and welcome people in. So much of contemporary music is about finding the right artist to convey what the work is about. Why are you performing this? Why did you commission this music? What are the topics around it? The reason we do quite well in what some might say are challenging classical projects is that we have a lot of people within all of the other genres who are really up for trying new things. We have those followers already.”

She believes that the time is ending where many artists seemed to care little about what did or didn’t interest their audiences. “My experience is that artists are more than ever trying to find ways to communicate what they’re doing, to as wide an audience as possible. I’m not saying that artists are performing less challenging repertoire, but I think that they’re trying to present it and perform it in new ways.” She points to one of her projects with Manchester Camerata, a contemporary programme at Glasgow’s Royal Exchange Square including the decidedly avant-garde Black Angels by George Crumb: “We performed it in the round; we had the idea that throughout the programme, we would be exploring the different senses, so there was blindfold at one point, there were scent machines at another point. Some people might call it gimmicky, but it filled the Royal Exchange Theatre.”

Although London has a vast amount of different music on offer, McShane is clear that Kings Place has a distinctive personality, which goes back to its very beginnings. The key to it all, she says, is Millican’s original vision for the building as shared space for businesses and the arts, with conferences and other commercial activities providing funding for the arts at a time where the funding environment is so difficult. Part of that personality, she hopes, will be around talent development, part will be about community projects, and part will be about the local environment.

“Where this building sits is really important in the history of King’s Cross. My impression of Kings Place Music Foundation is that it’s careful to consider which topical subjects we should explore through all of our events and programming, which I think is super important. We have a programming theme in mind in a couple of years’ time that will allow us to take stock of how this King’s Cross estate has changed. We’re going to look into the memory of King’s Cross – what has come before? What is it now? And what actually do we want it to be in the future?” When I reminisce that it’s not so long ago that the area was a notorious red-light district, McShane counters that Islington as a whole isn’t the homogenous well-to-do area that she had imagined: “Some of the biggest challenges and priorities in Islington are child poverty, loneliness and isolation. So how do we, as a venue which sits in Islington, help the community with some of those challenges?”

The Foundation’s charitable objectives require, McShane explains, that everything should be done for the widest possible audience. She tells me about a week-long residence by Venus Blazing Music & Theatre Trust, a remarkable organisation who use music and theatre to champion creativity with young people with down syndrome and other cognitive challenges.

I ask about what’s coming up next season. McShane is reluctant to give me too many details of events that aren’t yet announced, but I tease out a few highlights. “One of my favourite things is a weekend with violinist Daniel Pioro – I’ve worked with Daniel for a number of years. What I love is that he is uncompromising in his vision, but in the best way possible. He’s coming to do a weekend which is essentially around time unravelling, about audiences taking time out to listen to the earth around us, to listen deeply. He will also be performing an installation piece by James Tenney and a collaboration with Valgeir Sigurðsson.”

“We’re opening the Unwrapped series with a performance of Terry Riley’s Sun Rings, that was originally written for the Kronos Quartet and hasn’t been performed by anyone else. That will open our season with the Sacconi Quartet and Festival Voices; it has recordings from NASA missions throughout it as well – so I think that will be really interesting. We’ll have artists in residence as well: Gazelle Twin, Jason Singh and Sam Lee. The theme for the year is around Earth: we’re going to explore throughout the year how art can be a place where people can come to understand both the joys of the Earth around us and the great work that’s happening with regards to the climate emergency.”

Millican is quoted as saying that “Sam’s passion for how music and performance can positively impact people’s lives is inspirational.” I close the interview by asking her to name a moment when she truly affected lives, a moment of which she can be truly proud. “At Manchester Camerata, I started a talent development programme which gave six or seven young musicians the opportunity to come on board for a year. It allowed them to get training, not only to get lessons and to play in the orchestra, but to train up, to learn how to deliver community work, particularly with people living with dementia, which was a massive thing for us. Seeing those young artists and how brilliant they were in the beginning, how much we learned from them, and seeing their journey – this is what was really needed and we were able to do it in a really unique and special way. That’s one thing I can walk away from and think ‘yeah, that was good’”.

See upcoming events at Kings Place.

This article was sponsored by Kings Place.