What secrets lurk behind the stages of the world’s great concert halls? To find out, Brian Wise takes backstage tours of five leading venues in London and New York
If online travel forums and social media feeds are any indication, it’s not uncommon for travellers to visit a concert hall without ever attending an actual performance. Rather, they join in guided tours that focus on architecture and acoustics, performance history and personalities. Yet claims to take visitors ‘behind the scenes’ can vary, and some venues carefully edit their history. So what do you really get? I decided to road test five to find out just that…
Royal Albert Hall Tour London
The Royal Albert Hall offers both a backstage guided tour, which takes in dressing rooms and underground loading bay, and a front-of-house survey, which I joined. Our guide, a whimsical, slightly Willy Wonka-like man, seemed intent on showing that the 153-year-old arena offers much more than classical fare, as we lingered before historic photos of boxing and tennis matches, circuses, politicians, authors and pop spectacles (each visitor was also given a handheld tablet featuring additional pictures).
The tour moved to the Royal Box, affording an up-close view of 20 red velvet seats, which the family’s staff are invited to use when the sovereigns themselves have other plans. We stopped in the Royal Retiring Room, a faded lounge lined with family portraits (and soon to receive a makeover). A sizeable chunk of the tour covered namesake Prince Albert, who is memorialised with a lobby portrait and 15,000 letter A’s adorning the staircase railings and other nooks. When funds ran short in the 1860s, the hall planners sold £100 seats to donors, each with 999-year leases – meaning that some boxes have remained in families ever since. Unmentioned was that some seat holders sell their unwanted tickets at inflated prices, a practice that has sparked criticism and scrutiny in the House of Lords.
Later, we learned how rock concerts were banned for a period in the 1970s, as rowdy audiences nearly caused several ceilings to collapse, and how Pink Floyd in particular were put on the ‘do not book’ list for neglecting to inform hall management about an on-stage fireworks display. A visit to the fifth-floor gallery, meanwhile, incl
