October’s screening of   The New Babylon   was part of the City of London Sinfonia’s CLoSer.  The series’ lounge-style East London concerts are billed as shorter and more informal than the orchestra’s usual output, and are hosted by Village Underground, a venue with which some London-based readers may be familiar; a renovated warehouse, Village Underground is a multi-purpose arts space iconic locally by dint of the old Jubilee line carriages that sit on its roof. It is the sort of venue which makes people pronounce the word ‘Space’ with an audible capital letter. Like a lot of these ‘Spaces’, however, it is also an exceptional building, with brick walls and a lofty ceiling reminiscent of an industrial cathedral. Arriving there on a wet Shoreditch night, one was able to pass a good few minutes enjoying the faces of audience members evidently entering the venue for the first time. Long before the start of the performance the surroundings had already introduced a frisson of excitement.

For  The New Babylon , chairs had been laid out alongside a group of a hundred cushions of the floor. The cushions were the first of a few puzzling choices. More than one cushion-punter could be seen performing stretches on their way to the bar – a bar that remained open throughout the performance, with the audience encouraged to move around whenever they wanted and to tweet during the concert (using the hashtag ‘closer, with a capital C, L and S’. Yes, really). This was an unfortunate decision, and one that came across more as a rather forced attempt at informality than a genuine effort to ensure the audience’s comfort. The amount of noise during the performance was eminently distracting; the venue’s bar staff, who talked throughout, being the worse culprits. (A word to arts promoters: the convention of silence during classical performances is less to do with snobbery, and more to do with the practical considerations surrounding unamplified music.)

The opening of beer cans and constant chatter were particularly disappointing because the performance itself was so excellent. The New Babylon (1929) was written and directed by Grigori Kozintsev and Leonid Trauberg, and dramatises the story of the 1871 Paris Commune with a tale of two lovers separated by the barricades. It was the first film score by Shostakovich, and is certainly far from his most polished work; its energetic ambiguity makes, however, for very compelling viewing. The City of London Sinfonia played this tumultuous score beautifully. As with any film music, timing was paramount – the pace of  New Babylon  is swift – but the Sinfonia balanced the necessary precision with a fluidity that (almost) made the whole thing look simple. (Fiona Bonds, if it’s not too gauche to single out a single performer, was particularly entrancing on the viola). Those fond of spotting their musical references had plenty of material to sift over: the score is replete with snatches of 19th century French music, and the Shoreditch audience made their delight evident with each bar of Offenbach – although as the film darkened and the can-can music took on an almost ironic tone the laughs became suitably uncomfortable.

There were additional resonances to be enjoyed between the film and the space in which it was performed. One of the recurring motifs in  The New Babylon is that of re-purposing public space. Aerial shots of café awning, under which sit the film’s excellent just-the-right-side-of-caricature bourgeois, question who is entitled to own space; shots of the Paris Commune members harvesting paving stones from the road ask who can challenge this authority once it is inscribed in the environment. The history of the East End may not have been explicitly incorporated into the performance, but the brick walls of Village Underground were enough to remind us where we were: a stone’s throw from Cable Street, in a now fiercely expensive district of London. It may seem glib – and a little forced – to bring up such associations; but for many of today’s young concert-goers, questions of public space and economy are an inescapable background noise. I suspect I was not the only person deeply grateful for the CLS’ ’5iver’ offer, which allows under-25s to see a range of performances for five pounds a ticket. Do take advantage and go to the next one. But please: turn your phone off.

(The next event CLoSer event, ‘Alternative Love Songs’, is on February 12th 2014. Tickets are available now .)

Jane MacPherson is a freelance copywriter and lives alone.