Seeing & hearing: Ben Goldscheider plays Brian Elias’s Touching the Quick as part of Anish Kapoor exhibition at Hayward Gallery

Brian Elias: Touching the Quick – Ben Goldscheider at the Anish Kapoor exhibition, Hayward Gallery

Brian Elias: Touching the Quick; Ben Goldscheider; Anish Kapoor exhibition at Hayward Gallery
Reviewed 12 September 2026

Brian Elias’s music for solo horn, written in response to Anish Kapoor’s artworks and played by Ben Goldscheider amidst the exhibition, creating a remarkable sonic visual mix

Classical music and the visual arts do not mingle as much as they ought to, we tend to listen and look in isolation. As part of Anish Kapoor’s exhibition at Southbank Centre’s Hayward Gallery [referred to as ‘gobsmacking’ by The Guardian], horn player Ben Goldscheider is playing Brian Elias‘s Touching the Quick, a cycle of pieces for unaccompanied horn. Each one of the pieces responds to different parts of the exhibition and Goldscheider responds to this by playing each in a different room.

We gathered at 6pm on Saturday 12 September for a performance (Goldscheider was doing a second at 7pm, and there are further performances on Saturday 3 October), with a heartening number of people not only listening but following Goldscheider around on his perambulation.

We began in the room with Kapoor’s black pieces including his experiments with the light-swallowing nanomaterial Vantablack. Goldscheider’s quiet, low, sustained notes rather evoked Das Rheingold for me. And the way Elias gradually developed a motif as the music speeded up and rose in pitch brought fanciful ideas of sleeping dragons awaking. But even though more of a melodic line developed, each not felt considered, carefully placed. And ultimately it wound down, back to the beginning.

We moved to the next room, which features Kapoor’s Mount Moriah at the Gate of the Ghetto, an astonishing visceral red mountain hanging upside down from the ceiling. Under this Goldscheider played the second piece. Fast and vivid with a restless, mobile line with jagged edges, the music more than held its own against the visuals. The low sustained figure from the first piece returned, contrasting with the faster jagged material though the music ended back in thoughtful mode.

Our third stop was Ha Makom, a colossal mountainous landscape in vivid red (and we were warned not to touch, the colour stained). Here the music was high and fast, almost chattering, with short anxious phrases creating a sense of onwaard motion. Again there was a slower, thoughful section, but the opening material returned and gradually wound down. By now, we were conscious of the way Elias’s pieces not only responded in fascinatingly different ways to Kapoor’s works but presented Goldscheider with a range of technical challenges, the music encompassing a wide tessitura and varied styles from high and fast to low and sustained, also encompassing some double notes.

The fourth stop was in the final room, the one where the gallery warns of ‘artworks suggestive of blood and entrails’. Here, Goldscheider used hand-stopping to give the music a veiled, muted quality. There was a thoughtful sense of melancholy to the music, and a melodic line that did not seem far from Britten. Moments where we almost had a berceuse, moments of great intensity yet always veiled, returning finally to those long low note from the opening.

Brian Elias: Touching the Quick – Ben Goldscheider at the Anish Kapoor exhibition, Hayward Gallery

Except this wasn’t the end, and we returned to the first room of our journey for a repeat of the first piece, perhaps hearing it differently after our perambulation and perhaps seeing Kapoor’s work differently.