Their mission is simple: “To do no less than change the world through art and music,” says Gillian Moore. “We’re here to create a breathing space for artists,” adds Jane Beese, perhaps slightly less ambitiously. They are the new musical leadership of the Southbank Centre, tasked with changing perceptions of music and introducing audiences to its unsuspected delights.

Their appointments six months ago as respectively head of classical music and head of contemporary music is the fruition of a process that really began when Jude Kelly became artistic director of the Southbank in 2005, followed by the remaking of the Royal Festival Hall a couple of years later. It was to bring performance to the public through festival.

When Marshall Marcus, Southbank’s head of music, decided to pursue a dream of working with Venezuela’s La Sistema programme of using music to make social change – which resulted in the world famous Simòn Bolivar youth orchestra – he was replaced by a restructured music management at the arts centre, with Moore and Beese, both old Southbank hands, given new posts at the head, but with equal status.

With a classical music degree from Glasgow, Moore had had a long association with the Southbank starting in 1993 as head of education, then working with the London Sinfonietta, a resident ensemble, and since 2006 head of contemporary culture. Beese came to London to read government and history at the London School of Economics, but chiefly, she says, to see rock and roll bands. After ten years working for booking agencies she joined the Southbank’s programming team in 2001. In particular she has been concerned with Meltdown, in many ways the microcosm of this festivalisation. She has masterminded nine of the 18 so far, working with the likes of David Bowie, Patti Smith, Morrissey and last year Ray Davies.

Once the Festival Hall was a hire venue with producers bringing the likes of Ella Fitzgelad, Frank Sinatra and Pink Floyd, but now all programming is internal, though with partners. Moore’s role is officially to be responsible for the development and programming of classical music, while Beese’s is to do the same for rock, electronica, world and folk music. But it’s more complicated than that, they say. “Gillian thought this new prescriptive description meant wouldn’t be able to listen to rock music any more, a terrible thought for her,” Beese says with a smile and a glance at her friend. “Actually, we’ve worked so closely together for so long that this is a confirmation of what we were already doing”. Beese herself is to lace in.

For Moore, it’s a deliberate turning back to the ethic of what the Festival Hall was built for, the Festival of Britain in 1951, and to spread the programming all over the 21-acre site.

They are the spearhead of a campaign to do two things: dispel the perception of contemporary classical composition as “squeaky gate” music, and to break down the barriers between musics. They must also keep faith with the classical repertoire for which the Festival Hall was built and with its principal residents, the London Philharmonic and the Philharmonia orchestras, which remain major draws. “We must make sure that the likes of Daniel Barenboim still see this as their natural home,” Moore says.

Jude Kelly sees festival as the means of engagement, but the festivals they do now spring from different sources, Beese says, and the partnerships vary depending on the event. “So Alchemy, British and South Asian arts, came from a congregation of a lot of partners that had already worked here in different ways, but WOW (Women of the World) three years ago came from an open call, a shout out to anyone who wanted to be involved in the think-ins we put together in advance of programming,” Beese explains. The constraints of budget cuts also means they have to be increasingly creative and entrepreneurial about how theyu work.

All this is manifested in a dizzying array of events, particularly this summer – most of it components of what the Southank is billing as the Festival of the World. How intimately composers know other musical genres is graphically illustrated by the American contemporary classical composer Steve Reich who has been commissioned by the London Sinfonietta to compose a new work based on songs by Radiohead, following a meeting he had with the group’s composer Jonny Greenwood, who was himself inspired by classical composers like Penderecki and Messaien. That will have its world premiere this summer.

In homage to the Olympics, 20 contemporary composers have been commissioned to write a 12-minute piece each with vaguely athletic themes, all of which will be performed over the weekend of July 13-15, mostly at free performances, and they will be available for composing workshops, all delivered by the PRS Foundation in partnership with BBC Radio 3 and with funding from arts philanthropists, the Cohens. Another feature showing the happy cross-overs that have always been there and often with the most unlikely commissioners – in this case Royal Mail – is to be a screening of the 1936 film Nightmail, with a live performance of Benjamin Britten’s score and a recitation of W H Auden’s poetry.

With so much of their own programming to do – “I used to think I worked hard, but this is different,” Moore says – the extra layer of the Olympics this summer might be seen as a quotient too far, but the two music chiefs see it as another opportunity for partnerships and new offerings to their ever-changing audiences. They have a part in the Festival 2012 River of Music, a weekend sound blast along the Thames that BT is sponsoring, and they are programming into the Southbank’s Africa Utopia month-long festival of drama, film, literature, dance fashion and music which is part of the Cultural Olympiad.

Meltdown in August is being programmed by the singer Antony Hegarty (Antony and the Johnsons) who has coaxed out of retirement the singer Elizabeth Fraser, once of The Cocteau Twins. His programme includes Marc Almond, and goes on to explore New York’s artrock scene and the experimental music of William Basinski.

The Meltdown phenomenon has been the Southbank giving musicians the opportunity to give audiences a glimpse into their minds. It works by the chosen curator negotiating a workable theme with Jane Beese and then giving her their list of artists for her to try to book – this time she has had an 85% success rate, “a measure of how respected he is in the industry”. Last year it was Ray Davies’s Meltdown, which included Harrison Birtwistle and Peter Maxwell-Davies as well a recreation of Ready, Steady, Go! “That has become the ethos of the place,” she says. “We didn’t change everything last December when we were given these titles, we’ve been doing it together for five years.”

Bryn Terfel’s own music festival used to take place each summer in a field in North Wales but lost its funding and in 2007 ceased to be. It was called Faenol but popularly known as Brynfest, and for four days in July the festival is being brought back on the Southbank, with Terfel bringing his favourites, including Welsh National Opera’s orchstra and Welsh male voice choirs from around the world to London.

Moore says that what they are there for is to reach as many people as possible “and really engage them”, to do programming to the highest possible artistic standards, and to take risks which you couldn’t do in a commercial situation”. You would hardly expect her to say anything else, but the biggest gamble of them all is the year long The Rest is Noise festival, and exposition of the 20th century’s classical music and the world it inhabited, to which the LPO is committing its entire 2013 programming.

In 2007 the New York music critic Alex Ross published a book of the same title that exploded the mystique of classical music and related it to the world beyond; it sold 250,000 copies worldwide in 15 languages. “It was the luckiest thing,” Moore says. “When we were thinking about how we present work with a narrative that has a social and philosophical context, this book arrived”. The year will include concerts, talks, films, performances and participation events, and will leave no aspect of a century untold through its music.

“We’re trying to pull out of it not only longer engagement with artists but a deeper engagement of audiences,” Beese says. “It’s aimed at a far wider group of people who might be thinking they know a bit about classical music but not how it relates to the rest of the world”. For instance, adds Moore, you cannot really get Stockhausen’s music unless you are aware of the terrible war he experienced as a conscripted teenage stretcher bearer in 1944 and 1945. BBC 4, Radio 3 and online connections will be participating, and the whole thing is to cost unspecified hundreds of thousands.

“We’re getting the place back to its roots of 1951, making a rhythm of festivals through which we can make sense of the great international work that we present here,” Gillian Moore sums up. “This is and has to be the most inspiring arts centre in the world.”

The British Council’s arts programme is back on full throttle with a new director and a bold global strategy that, he hopes, will reinstate the organisation’s dulled international reputation and create a unique universal network.
Graham Sheffield succeeding Rebecca Walton as director of arts seems the most logical gambit in chess history, a checkmate for the arts against bureaucracy.
She, an old BC hand, had been drafted in after the debacle of 2007-8 when the council’s famed arts operations were to be decimated in favour of ‘cultural diplomacy’. Graham Devlin was commissioned to report on the whole mess when the council’s chief executive, Martin Davidson, had made a spectacular u-turn following the intervention of the then Foreign Secretary, and his recommendations were almost wholly acted on.
They included the secondment of a ‘specialist advisor’ to help her put ‘the arts back into the main bloodstream of the organisation’, and who more logical than the arts director of the Barbican? It is his, Sheffield’s, phrase about returning the arts to the bloodstream from which, implicitly, it had been extracted.
In 2009 Sheffield had very much a full time job at the Barbican bedding in with the new managing director there, Nicholas Kenyon, and steering the City’s response to the Olympic challenge, but he accepted Walton’s brief with enthusiasm. ‘
She brought pragmatism and a listening ear, restored morale to what had been a renowned arts department, reinstated programmes and rebuilt budgets, all of which she had worked on with Sheffield. Together they devised a five point schdeme of showcasing British art, promoting cultural leadership in areas of interest, the development of a creative economy network, building creative capacity and the introduction of a relevant arts element into all of the BC’s existing programmes. He is it moving it on.
Fifteen months ago Walton was promoted to the executive board in the key role of director of partnerships and business development, and at this point, the autumn of 2010, you would think the obvious replacement would be Graham Sheffield.
The symmetry collapsed, however, because he was no longer here, having left the Barbican to pursue the “job of a lifetime” building a new cultural quarter in West Kowloon, Hong Kong.
As it happened, miserably for Sheffield at the time but happily for the British Council eventually, he found himself caught in a political and bureaucratic firefight in the former British colony, defenceless and unable to manoeuvre his cultural proposals past a battery of special interests and private agendas, and he was forced to resign on medical advice. He arrived back in the UK for Christmas, and found that Rebecca Walton had still not been replaced. Symmetry restored, he started as the British Council’s director of arts in May 2011.
‘I’m really building on what we started together,’ he says modestly. ‘Staff morale was not at its greatest, to put it mildly, and she gave people a sense of belonging again, and that was extremely important.
‘We’d lost touch with artists so our specialists disappeared,’ he says. ‘We’re reinstating them. One of the first things I said I wanted to do was to keep things very simple, and make sure we had the right people in the right places.’
To say that Sheffield belongs in the arts is like saying an apple belongs in a fruit bowl. He started as a classical musician, playing piano and conducting, and his first ambition was to be an opera director. He went to the BBC and by the age of 25 was working on the music output of Radio 3, Radio 4 and the World Service. In 1990 he went to the Southbank Centre as music director, and in 1995 he took on the new post of arts director at the Barbican. A preview of the situation he was to encounter at the British Council, the Barbican was trembling from the effects of a small earthquake when managing director Detta O’Cathain was forced to leave after her commodification programme aliented resident arts organisations and art form heads. Her successor, John Tusa, and Sheffield transformed the institution. The Royal Shakespeare Company left and was replaced by the innovatory Bite season, a proper art gallery was carved out of the heart of the brutalist building, the theatre and concert hall were upgraded. Sheffield introduced international festivals and appointed new associate directors and ensembles.

‘Each job I’ve done somebody has taken me on trust,’ he said then. ‘Before I went to the BBC I’d never been in a studio before, I’d never worked in a concert hall until I went to the SBC, and here they took a risk on me and theatre.’

How much risk the British Council is taking on with him remains to be seen, but at 59 he is seen as a safe pair of hands, albeit hands that are never still.
He has spent his first six months in post identifying the regions of the world that will best benefit from his attention, and that will best benefit British artists, and identifying the people take on these brand new posts.

‘The corporate line is that we’re a cultural relations organisation, and the arts clearly has a very big role to play as part of that, ’ he says. ‘End of corporate statement.’
There cannot be a feasible policy that fits every situation, as had been believed: each region has its own history, capability and culture, each will need to be treated differently. So he has appointed six regional cultural leaders, half found internally, half from outside, who Sheffield says are critical in linking what is happening around the world into the specialist teams in London – forensically, not superficially.
The regions are the Americas, based in Colombia; wider Europe in Istanbul; wider South Asia in Dacca; the Middle East and North Africa in Cairo; Sub-Saharan Africa in Johannesburg; and EU Europe, which is split between Paris and Bucharest. Joining up the dots, Sheffield calls it, but that includes not only learning the terrain but affirming – or establishing – vital ambassadorial and political contacts. Gregory Nash, founder of The Point at Eastleigh, is bound for Istanbul; Shreela Ghosh, most recently director of the Free Word Centre, goes to Dacca; Steve Stenning, festival producer, heads for Cairo. There are already leaders established in Vietnam for East Asia, Beijing for China and New Delhi for India.
‘It’s very much a mutual agenda now, it’s no longer about just sending the RSC to far-flung colonies. Those new positions are really at the start of a new global network,’ he says.
Three years ago Russia was a major headache for the British Council, with 15 of their 16 offices closed amid accusations of subversive activities. The attitude towards British culture has thawed dramatically since, and though the offices are still closed, electronic communications have meant there is no hindrance to a startling upgrade of activity, particularly in the visual arts.
Here, the Gagarin statue was unveiled in July outside the British Council’s London offices by the Russian ambassador; he also went to the London Book Fair for the first time in five years, where Russia was the focus. There, President Medvedev deliberately mentioned the arts in a communiqué marking David Cameron’s visit (Cameron did not), and there are Gormley, Henry Moore and William Blake exhibitions going out there in 2012, as well as a Britten centenary project in 2013. It is traditional cultural diplomacy, where the arts take the lead over politics. ‘We’re not going to change the world single-handed, but it certainly helps to create a space where two countries can talk together in a more civilized way,’ Sheffield says.
At home, Graham Devlin’s charge that the BC’s commitment to the arts community had been weak struck a nerve, and there has been a concentrated effort to engage the sector. ‘A lot of my job is rebuilding confidence in the British Council, not only with the big institutions like the Tate and the National Theatre but with young talent too. We’ve got to cover the spectrum,’ Sheffield says. ‘The teams are now very heavily engaged in talking to the sector and trying to be partners, and we can be better partners if we’re got a strong network abroad’. He is working closely with the UK arts councils, and there will be a stronger BC profile at home, particularly at arts festivals.
The big effort for 2012 is the Dickens Project. Over 50 countries taking readings, film showings and performances. ‘We don’t realise in this country how universal a figure Dickens is,’ Sheffield says. ‘It’s rather taken me by surprise”. The list of those that have asked for Dickens in his bicentenary year goes from Armenia to Zimbabwe, with Germany, Brazil and Vietnam in between
‘They want to benefit from some of our skills and knowledge of the creative cultural economy, and we see ourselves as a kind of managing centre. The UK is one of the strongest providers as well as a mover and shaker in the field, and we’re coming up with a more coherent arts story that you will see emerge in 2012.’

Brakes off for music’s global journey
The new regime ‘has put the wind back in my sails,’ says the British Council’s head of music, Cathy Graham. Because the new regional leaders can immerse themselves in their areas, however large, they will be able to create a strategic overview ‘so that we can provide exactly what’s needed for that region,’ she says’.

‘For instance, classical music is not necessarily the right thing for the young people of Tanzania, where hip-hop and rap, so we are working on that’.

Classical music, though, has the major part to play in every global region, and sometimes the market place is in the UK. A growing partnership with the Huddersfield Contemporary Music Festival to which producers from abroad are brought has seen the festival itself morph from a receiving event into a producer. ‘We have a freedom now that comes with deeper knowledge of the regions, and it means we’ve been able to take the brakes off. So much is happening, when four years ago everything had almost ground to a halt.’

A major project is the Britten Bicentenary in Moscow in 2013, on which Graham is working with a new partner, the Britten Pears Foundation. It will involve high profile performances, an exhibition, the translation of a biography into Russian, and anon-line project with young composers, Brazilian as well as Russian, which it is hoped will be available world-wide.

‘We’re learning how to make new partnerships which are not only about money but ideas and experience,’ she says. ‘We’re also creating higher profile kin Britain for what we do.’

Just under way is a programme of composer residences in China, with the Performing Right Society for Music Foundation.

While most arts organisations gird their loins for a period in the economic wilderness one orchestra is basking in the glow of a healthy bank balance and a full diary. Simon Tait meets Oxford Philomusica director Marios Papadopoulos to find out how it’s done

Subsidised symphony orchestras up and down the country are bracing themselves for a dramatic drop in income as the government grant falls away over the next three years, but there is one that has no such concerns.

An 80-strong professional ensemble, the Oxford Philomusica has never had brighter prospects. Nor has it ever had core funding, and over its 12 years of existence it has steadily developed its fortunes. It is the official resident orchestra of the University of Oxford, and this year it is looking at a 60% growth in its bank account, contentedly in the black since a watershed year in its relatively short history.

Its creator and musical director is the pianist and conductor Marios Papadopoulos who describes himself as a maverick, and a close observer of him and his orchestra says, ‘Marios doesn’t understand how the music system works in this country, which is probably the secret of his success’. Born in Cyprus, he comes from the non-musical family of an accountant, began piano at five and got as far as Grade 8 at the age of 12 before the island’s teaching reserve expired, and the family moved to England. He was privately tutored and says that it was in 1972 when he was the Young Musician of the Year, an accolade that comes with a sheaf of bookings, that he first played at the Sheldonian Theatre in Oxford. ‘I just fell for Oxford, and we’ve been together ever since,’ he says.

His career took him elsewhere, including to the City University for his doctorate, and 1972 was also the year that Michael Tippett first booked Papadopoulos for the Bath Festival, to play Tippet’s Fantasia on a theme by Handel. Unknown to him, William Walton was in the audience celebrating his 70th birthday, and the 17-year-old joined Tippett and Walton for a celebratory lunch. ‘I was completely over-awed, I couldn’t eat or speak through the whole meal,’ he recalls.

By the mid-90s Papadopoulos was also conducting quite a bit, and going through a career reassessment: ‘I never enjoyed travel much, I always wanted to have my own platform, and there it was staring at me – Oxford’. It was the one city outside London where an audience for classical music could be pretty much guaranteed, and the orchestra would be his vehicle as virtuoso pianist and conductor. It was near enough to the capital to be able to fish the pond of freelance players, ‘an hour further away and it couldn’t have worked,’ Papadopoulos says.

The name was a forgone conclusion, and the distinctive logo, ‘op’ with the natural symbol, was printed on all their notepaper and publicity material before they knew that beneath their radar there was already a student ensemble called the Oxford Philharmonic. So to fit the logo, they called it Philomusica instead.

But it was tough, a professional orchestra whose players need to be paid has to hit the ground running, and box office has never been a major earner for the Philomusica. The Sheldonian, its lovely home, has just 60 premium seats for which it can charge a top price of £37.50, and ticket sales account for only 11% of its annual £1m income. More than 60% comes from sponsorship, donations and individuals, about 13% from the orchestra’s Friends organisation, and the rest from one-off project funding.

What changed its fortunes dramatically was the university’s decision in 2002 to adopt it as its resident orchestra, and although there is no direct funding from Oxford, almost overnight the Philhamusica’s bank balance was reversed from a £36,000 overdraft to a £34,000 credit the next year. The residency is approved by the chancellor and vice-chancellor of the university and renewable every four years. The fact that Vladimir Ashkenazy is the orchestra’s patron won’t have harmed it’s cause.

‘I think the university, in fund-raising mode, realised there could be a cultural icon they could use when they entertain their alumni, and music attracts people who have perhaps had enough of High Table dinner, that perhaps music would be something different,’ Papadopoulos says.

But the association is much more seriously fruitful. The Philharmonic is now firmly embedded with Oxford’s music faculty. ‘The faculty offered excellent academic courses but not a great deal of help for instrumental tuition and performance opportunities, so we complement it in that way’. They also offer apprenticeships to graduate musicians, auditions, workshops and masterclasses, and the composer workshops are well established. There are two Oxford music undergraduate apprentices on the playing strength, and three graduates working in the orchestra’s office. It draws on the choral traditions of the Oxford colleges, and the choirs of Christ Church and New College are frequent associates.

Papadopoulos and the Philomusica have a commitment to youth, and in the new season no fewer than three former BBC Young Musicians of the Year – Nicola Benedetti (violin), Jennifer Pike (violin) and Mark Simpson (clarinet) – are performing, the latter two being current students at the university. It’s annual summer piano competition has become an important platform for young musicians wanting to launch themselves.

That commitment spills over to the community, and the orchestra has forged an equally firm partnership with the local authorities, city and county, working with schools, community centres and hospitals, so that in 2007 the Philomusica won the Oxford Times Community Award.

The operation has been augmented in the last year by the appointment of a development manager, Simon Payne, an Oxford classics graduate and ‘useful’ bassoon player who had been pursuing a successful career in publishing before reverting to fundraising and now being lured back to music to look for ‘new opportunities’.

The orchestra is expanding its operations. In March it makes its debut as the orchestra in association at the new Waterside in Aylesbury, which opened in October, and Reading also beckons.

Payne deflects credit. ‘All I have to do is follow up the contacts and connections Marios has made,’ he says, but the art of the follow-up is clearly paying dividends. ‘What Marios has done is attract useful and important people to join the trust or the advisory council, and you just have to look at the names – Lady Heseltine, Lord Chadlington, Sir Curtis Price – who all work hard for the orchestra’. Recent appointments to the trust are the restaurateur Raymond Blanc and the judge Sir David Keene.

‘We have made ourselves part of our community, that is our secret, and that community is now beyond Oxford and in the Thames Valley,’ Papadopoulos says. ‘We know our audiences and we give them what they want, but we depend on the support of people who help us and won’t continue to do that if we let our standards drop. If there’s a secret, that’s it.’

It takes chutzpah to sink £100m into a concert hall and office complex during a downturn. But for the quietly spoken Peter Millican, Kings Place is the culmination of a life’s work, and he has no regrets. As the year-long Mozart Unwrapped celebration nears, he talks to Simon Tait about the first two years of a venue that likes to do things differently.

Peter Millican is sitting by himself at a table in the King’s Place restaurant, The Rotunda. The table in front of him is empty except for a small, square brochure. He looks like he’s waiting his turn to be interviewed for a job, but with his shock of grey hair and his impish face dominated by large round spectacles he looks much more like the architect who designed this place than a candidate for the kitchen staff.

In fact, the lamb on the menu comes from the Northumberland farm Millican lives on with his family when he’s not here. He is the owner, creator and programmer of this building, the newest of London’s concert venues and an innovatory place of work and play which may become the model for others around the world.

And the small square brochure? It’s his programme for Mozart Unwrapped, the year-long celebration that takes in some of the lesser known works with added study days to expand knowledge of the composer and his work, an element of the presentation of art Millican is particularly keen on. In his foreword to the programme he coins Robins Landon’s famous quote, that Mozart’s music is ‘as good an excuse for mankind’s survival as we shall ever encounter’.

The season begins in January, the third since King’s Place opened two years ago and by far the biggest. There will be more than 40 concerts and events in the year with the emphasis, Millican says, on variety.

It seems to be a gigantic piece of arrogance: build your own concert hall and then programme all the concerts yourself when you haven’t yourself even mastered the complexities of Chopsticks on the piano. It isn’t like that. Millican has brought on as residents four chamber orchestras: Aurora, the Orchestra of the Age of the Enlightenment, the Chilingirian Quartet and the London Sinfonietta which each have office space here, and know eachother socially as a result as well as musically.

‘What it has amounted to,’ Millican explains, ‘is getting each of the ensembles to curate their own bit. In effect, they’re doing what they want to do, and I’m there to sort out any clashes – there have been one or two – and if there was some things not there which I thought ought to be, I tried to include them. Like the Mass in C – it’s a big piece and there’s a cost element, and maybe the curators were being thoughtful of my budget.

‘What I want to provide is something the audience might not be expecting but which they are excited to take, and there’s nothing bigger than Mozart for doing that.

‘So this is the biggest “Uncovered” we’ve done. It’s all the works we can do in a hall our size. I want to give the audience as much or as little as they want, so we’re going in in depth.’

The most surprising offering is the Adagio for Glass Armonica in C that the Schubert Ensemble and Alasdair Malloy will play in October, featuring the tapering column of glass invented by Benjamin Franklin and composed for by both Mozart and Beethoven that is made up of a series of glass semi-circles of different sizes whose edges are stroked with a damp finger, like playing the rims of wine glasses. ‘Rarely performed,’ says Millican, ‘and just right for us. And the organ works are very interesting, we’re using the most sophisticated organ we’ve had here. Next is Brahms.

‘I didn’t intend this to be a landmark event, we did Chopin in our first year and Beethoven last time, but it is easily the most complicated programme we have devised. I knew we had to do something rather special, though, and when Levon told he wanted to do the early string quartets and quintets, it all rather fell into place. The public have really taken it on, too, it’s already selling well, and we seem to be creating a sort of family which feels at home here.’

Levon Chilingirian was the first to test the acoustic of the main hall, still wearing a hard hat because the builders hadn’t finished. ‘It’s a marvellous hall, it was exactly right, even then’, and he brought his ensemble in as first residents.

‘It’s very open here,’ he says, referring to the regime rather than the space. ‘Any musicians can come up with an idea and if it fits it’s in the programme, quite different from most venues where you’re told “we’re not doing that sort of thing this season”. It’s a unique arrangement where Peter gathers people he knows together to talk over ideas, and then invites some of them to curate.’

It’s part of Millican’s vision of creating work and leisure around art, a concept that so excited the architect, Jeremy Dixon, that two years since it opened he is still enthusiastically showing people round

‘I think art civilises life and I think places like this mean quite a lot to the people who work in the building,’ Millican explains. ‘It was always my intention to have a mix of art and office, there was never any intention to put residential or retail in, and I was very keen to put visual arts and music into it. But that’s about as far as my ideas had got before I found the place.’

He had actually bought the site, with an old Royal Mail sorting office on it, in 1999 having only just completed his first art/work building, Central Square, another former post office building but this time in Newcastle.

Millican, now 61, is not a Londoner. A Tyneside property developer, has the faintest of Scouse slants to his speech. The son of a Liverpool pharmacist, he decamped to the North East to do a business degree but on graduating became an optometrist, developing a chain of shops on Tyneside. He sold them 15 years or so ago, and found that he was a property developer.

He is modest to the point of self effacement – he’s not in Who’s Who because he has never got round to filling the form in, ‘I don’t think it’s that important, to be honest’ – and very private. He is 61, lives on the farm near Corbridge that has been the family home for 30 years, and has three adult children, a doctor and two property developers, and that has to be prised out. No names.

And it looks as if King’s Place might become a paradigm for the workplace of the future. Notwithstanding political funding cuts, trawls for philanthropy to preserver cultural life, economy switch-backs, what is happening here in a schizoid place between the bucolic Regents Canal and that monument to industrial ambition, King’s Cross Station, amounts to a prototype for how to make the best of art in a working environment. He knew this was a key site, close to a public transport cross-roads for road and rail, even before the King’s Cross development got going

The special ingredient is the public, allowed to come through whether there are concerts on or not as well as those with offices here, use the facilities, eat and drink here, and give both the building and the arts life. He has even coined a word for such a building. He calls it “a beckoning”.

His is an undue modesty. Anybody who was risk-averse would never have bought a central London site with no idea what do with it, and then spent £100m putting a concert hall/office clock on it in an economic down-turn. A green building.

For Millican is also ecologically committed. Dixon liked the idea of mixing art and work, and says that then having to make it green was ‘a bit of a challenge’. It has a unique air changing system which Millican had to loose a whole floor of office space to accommodate, and even the undulating glass the building is faced with is shaped to be heat and light catching. The engineers Ove Arup had a major problem to make the three-storey deep basement safe from flooding by the canal, but have cracked it with a box-inside-a-box solution.

In 1999, buying at the bottom of the market, Millican already knew that the site was the biggest public transport footprint in the country where cars need never be a consideration, and that it would be even more of one when the rest of the Kings Cross site development is completed. That process starts next October when Central St Martins College of Art, 6,000 students adding a new riff to his audience profile, and so much more to come in the next three years in the plan of the developer, Argent.

As you walk in, the atmosphere is a mixture of café and reading room, with people working over files and lap-tops as they nibble from plates of salad and sandwiches. Around them is art, hanging or standing, and between the bench tables and the food bar is a downward escalator well with more art.

There are nine floors to the building, three of them underground. Above are the Guardian and Observer newspapers, Network Rail, the shoe manufacturers Wolverine, the business consultancy Logica, the Esme Fairbairn Foundation and the environmental water management company Veolia, ‘a nice mix of tenants’, paying a proper rent.

Elsewhere are the offices given for minimal rent to arts organisations – including the OAE, the Chilingirians, the London Sinfonietta and Aurora. Others hot desk on short-term deals Down the escalator are the art gallery and the concert halls (450 and 200 seats respectively). Outside, where you can take your coffee beside the canal, half a dozen kids are sitting round a table drawing the William Pye water sculptures on temporary exhibition.

There is no artistic director for Kings Place, just Millican’s Kings Place Music Foundation and the curators who schedule the concerts and the rest of the entertainment outside of the Unwrapped programme – Thursday night comedy, Monday night literature, and the music is not just classical but jazz, folk and even opera.

In September there was the Kings Place Festival, an annual event of four days which is a giddying mixture of stuff from the Guardian editor talking about whatever piano-playing editors talk about to concert hall audiences, to the legendary Carthy/Swarbrick folk team reunited and the London Sinfonietta with Thomas Adès’s chamber music. And that was just the first day.

‘Getting the programme right is a balance between putting on stuff that one is pretty sure will sell and things that are intellectually interesting,’ Millican says, and after a predictably slow start the box office is moving, with tickets going at a very respectable 30,000 a year. He encourages people to feel at home here, and some come to as many as 100 concerts a year, he says, many to 30 or more.

What was highlighted by reviewers at the opening was that this is a private development, with no public funding, subsidy or lottery money whatever. Actually, the enterprise depends heavily on the subsidised sector, because most of the UK-based performers are Arts Council funded in one way or another.

It is an example of how Millican believes the ‘mixed arts economy’ can work, the private and public sectors folding together, and is a contradiction of the notion, born out of the difficulty in getting corporate funding for the heavily subsidised and lottery funded Royal Festival Hall refurbishment, that the two don’t mix. Are there lessons for the subsidised sector?

‘Funding the arts is an impossible task, to be honest,’ is how he responds. ‘I think there’s a lot of art that wouldn’t work without subsidy. We’re small, I can’t imagine trying to scale it up to do something like the Royal Opera House without subsidy. What probably works best is to have a mix, and to have some of the arts subsidised in the way it is, and some peripheral bits privately funded”. Which should be music to the government’s ears, although to his knowledge Jeremy Hunt has ever crossed the threshold, and although Ed Vaizey has ‘had a look around and seemed quite impressed’, he hasn’t asked for Millican’s advice. ‘Got enough people giving him that, I think’.

‘I think we can say it’s a success,’ Millican cautiously allows. ‘The first two years have been incredibly hard, but it’s OK now. One of the tricks seems to be making space work hard – we run conferences during the day and have quite a fast turn around with concerts in the evening. The music is still not at break even; that could take up to five years, but the gap is narrowing.’

He would change nothing, he says. None of the white knuckle decisions made before the credit crunch, the recession, the art subsidy cut, would be different. So what is the next project? ‘This is it,’ he says. ‘This is what I’ve done, this is what I’m doing.’

[Box 1]
Unpicking Mozart
‘By rethinking Mozart we reinvent him, just as he continually re-invented his own music through experimentation, modification and transformation,’ asys Professor Simon Keefe, hed of musc at Sheffield University and the author of a number of book about Mozart, including most recently The Cambridge Mozart Encyclopaedia. He is running a series of Saturday study days throughout the Mozart Unwrapped Year. All are at King’s Place, 10.30-4.30 with refreshments and light lunch, £47.50 per study day.

January 22: Understanding Mozart, portrayals, biographies, trends in reception, with Prof Keefe.
March 12: Mozart in Context, musical life in Salzburg and Vienna in Mozart’s time, with Prof Cliff Eisen.
April 16: Mozart the Performer-Composer, exploring the mind games of the performer-composer through autograph notes, with Prof John Irving.
May 21: Mozart’s Chamber Music, violinist Peter Cropper on the greatest chamber music.
September 17: Mozart’s Orchestral Music, Simon Keefe examines the symphonies, serenades and divertimenti.
October 15/November 12: Mozart’s Operas 1 & 2, their cultural and artistic contexts.
December 3: Mozart’s Sacred Music and the Requiem, the masses, their myths and legends.

[Box 2]
An 18th century acoustic
Original performances of Mozart’s work took place in private homes, though often palaces and villas with large rooms, small opera houses, cathedral and churches. King’s Place’s 400-seat Hall One approximates most closely to the environments Mozart would have performed in, says Ove Arup’s Rob Harris: ‘The aim was to capture the important characteristics of the classic historic European halls, with the shoebox design, optimum for this scale of auditorium. The entire hall, including the classic coffered ceiling, is lined with the oak veneer cut from a single 50-year-old Bavarian tree. With good sight lines for every seat, and a warm, clear, never over-brilliant acoustic, Hall One is the perfect place to rediscover Mozart,’ he says.