Tour of Royal Birmingham Conservatoire

Hello and welcome to the Royal Birmingham Conservatoire. The RBC is at the heart of the BCU campuses here, and we are a short journey away from Birmingham New Street and Moor Street Stations.

This building was opened in 2017, which was my first year at the Conservatoire and is also home to the Music courses that we have here too.

There are plenty of local accommodation blocks and I would say under a ten minute walk away.

Or a five minute run if you're running late.

So we're now currently in Adrian Bolts Bar where you can get your lunch, all sorts of snacks and drinks here, some baked goods and it's just quite a nice place to socialise as well.

And because this is a performance venue at the end of a long day, either as a student or a staff member, you can actually go to the bar itself and grab your favourite pint. It's a really good thing to do before a concert. And speaking of concerts, students get tickets for free for most of our events here.

The Bradshaw Hall is the perfect venue in the heart of the Conservatoire building with a capacity of 440 seats.

We have a range of live performances that happen in here, including recitals. Folk ensemble perform in here quite a lot. So one really cool thing about the Bradshaw Hall, as you can see, it has quite an interesting shape. You've got the acoustic optimisers on the wall, which means that the experience of all the performances will be quite unique.

And to accommodate all the ensembles we mentioned earlier, this space is completely flexible. So if the opera happened to be going on in here, or a brass band or the symphony orchestra, no matter what the ensemble is or the sound is down there, anywhere you sit in this building, there will be a fantastic listening experience.

From your very first week as a student, you will be able to make use of this fantastic space up until your very, very last final recital. In all of our big performance spaces, we have top of the range sound and lighting equipment to make the best performances sound and look incredible.

So this is one of our unique performance spaces. Let's have a look.

This is the East Side Jazz Club.

This club has been expertly designed for its quintessential cosy jazz club atmosphere. So a really cool thing about this club is that there are gigs that are held weekly, and students get to watch them for free.

This is the Experimental Performance Lab. Known as the lab for short. This is a cutting edge black box studio space equipped with multi-media surround sound and projector systems. So as an experimental musician, your craft can be executed perfectly in this space.

And we have some performances here that happen from our Acting and Applied Theatre courses, which is just really good because it helps. You can like really workshop a lot of things in here. We have a sacrificial floor as well, which is painted once a year. So you can do all sorts in this room.

So this is the organ studio. It's one of our smaller performance spaces, used a lot by the early music department and the vocal department specifically because of this acoustic. We are soon to have three organs in this space. But in the meantime, here is one of our organs just in front of me.

So this lovely space is the Recital Hall, which holds about a capacity of 150. But it is adaptable and holds a lot of our year classes here.

The seats go back, so no matter what the class is, whether we're standing and moving around or whether we're sat here listening to a lecture, this venue is completely flexible.

As a student here, you have a chance to take part in some performance classes that will happen either in here, the Recital Hall or the Bradshaw Hall upstairs.

We also have quite a lot of lunchtime music concerts that happen where that forms or ranges up to chamber music and even just solo performances.

We even have world class musicians coming in to deliver masterclasses almost every single week, and we are incredibly lucky to have them coming here.

So we are currently on the fourth floor, one of six floors here in the Conservatoire, and along this corridor we have an abundance of different practice rooms of different sizes, as well as offices and other fun things like that.

So this is one of our ensemble rooms that we have. You can have a few lessons in here as well, maybe like one to ones or even like chamber group sessions too. It's really good for coaching and just makes a nice space.

This is one of our many live rooms where you can record anything that you want to like, literally anything at all.

This is one of two music tech lab suites where we have up to date and modern, both hardware and software, to help students compose and create at any time.

We hope you've enjoyed our tour of the Royal Birmingham Conservatoire.

And we hope to see you soon.