We have secured a special opportunity for Victorian Society members to have privileged access to the Royal Academy of Music buildings and historical collections with Susana Caldeira, RAM’s Head of Collections, as our guide.
We meet in front of the RAM Main Building, a thoughtful exercise in Edwardian baroque (Sir Ernest George and Alfred Bowman Yeates, 1911). We shall visit the formal entrance sequence and the Duke’s Hall, the Academy’s principal venue — all embellished with good metalwork, marble columns and stained glass – and see a clever addition of two new performance spaces to the rear of the Main Building (Ian Ritchie, 2018).
The historic collections we shall see include five stone busts of composers salvaged from T. E. Knightley’s Queen’s Hall following its destruction by enemy bombing in 1941, the architects’ original drawings for the Main Building, and important collections of stringed and keyboard instruments, the latter illustrating the development of the pianoforte in the nineteenth century. As well as an introduction to the collections, we shall have a mini-recital of contemporary music on a Broadwood pianoforte of 1805, performed by one of the students.
Meeting place: Outside the front entrance at 5:50 for a 6 pm start.
Numbers are strictly limited and booking is essential.
Image: Royal Academy of Music,
Photo by Philafrenzy – Own work, CC BY 2.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=14579823