The Altrincham-born boss of the Barbican Centre – the largest performing arts centre in Europe – returned to his former school recently for the first time in almost 50 years.
Sir Nicholas Kenyon praised St Bede’s College in Manchester for embracing the arts and providing a breadth of education often shunned by politicians.
Speaking at the College Speech Day, where Sir Nicholas was guest of honour, he told current pupils about school life back in the 1960s.
“St Bede’s gave me an enormous grounding in life for which I will always be grateful and I’m sure you, too, will have the same experience and it will set you in amazingly good stead for the future,” he said.
After watching performances of Nella Fantasia by head girl Charlotte Killingley, a violin solo of Reverie by Martha Wall and a scene form ‘The Taming of the Shrew’, Sir Nicholas, who grew up in Altrincham, reminisced about his time at St Bede’s and talked about the political battle to embed culture in the curriculum.
“The cultural life now of the College is clearly fantastic and I think it needs to grow and develop because I think we all believe this is an absolutely fundamental thing we are struggling with every single day of the week in the arts. Embedding the arts in a humane education is absolutely essential. It is wonderfully rewarding and it is not recognised by politicians.
“I had the chance to talk to the Prime Minister about that quite recently and he just kept batting it away because the idea is that the arts is a nice-to-have add-on for those who probably aren’t going to be very good at engineering.”
Sir Nicholas has been managing director of the Barbican Centre since 2007 having previously been controller of BBC Radio 3, director of the BBC Proms and a music critic for the likes of The New Yorker, The Times and Observer.
He was knighted in 2008 and has written books on Bach, Mozart, Simon Rattle and the BBC Symphony Orchestra.
