Fans of Ron Arad received a treat on Saturday afternoon (20 August), when the BBC Proms decamped to north London's Roundhouse from the classical music festival's usual home at the Royal Albert Hall. Arad's 360-degree installation Curtain Call—a curtain comprising 5,600 silicon strands, onto which are projected videos by artists including Christian Marclay and David Shrigley—formed a cordon around the audience, most memorably in the UK premiere of Georg Friedrich Haas's 2007 work Open Spaces II (in memory of James Tenney). As Andrew Gourlay conducted on an empty stage, small groups of string musicians from the London Sinfonietta, semi-visible from their positions just outside the curtain, spent 15 minutes seemingly imitating a broken accordion while the backdrop showed footage of what looked like flailing French fries. If you missed it, worry not: Arad's work is on show until 29 August, and there are two concerts in the Curtain Call series still to come.
