With an ear-tickling flourish of virtuosic oboe (music from Simon Holt, flashing fingers from Melinda Maxwell), and a less welcome riff of offstage hammering (courtesy of The Guardian, moving noisily into the offices upstairs), the newest concert venue in London opened its doors on Wednesday morning. Nobody will complain that there wasn’t enough to hear. Once the banging stopped, 15 hours of music was performed on the first day alone, and this astonishing 20-concerts-a-day parade of classical and contemporary, Western and Eastern, continues until Sunday.

If this indicates the energetic programming that the unsubsidised Kings Place will offer round the year, other venues in London will be alarmed. Especially as the Kings Place main hall is a delightful space in which to hear music. It is bright in acoustics (perhaps a bit too bright for very loud singing). It’s easy on the eye, with oak-veneered columns and recessed blue walls. And with just 420 seats and an all-round balcony, it is refreshingly intimate.

I have less affection, so far, for Hall Two: one of those basic black boxes that are supposed to be “multifunctional” but actually ideal for very little. Sitting halfway back on its untiered seating, I could see almost nothing of the Indian dancers and musicians from the Bharatiya Vidya Bhavan Centre as they performed pieces celebrating the elephant-god Ganesh, the “remover of obstacles”. The obstacle I needed removing was the audience in front of me. Sadly, Ganesh didn’t oblige.

With world music, jazz, folk and minimalism all represented on the opening day, Kings Place certainly trumpeted its eclectic programming policy. Nothing wrong with that. But entrusting its various strands to “curators”, who then introduced each concert with different degrees of presentational skills (and, in one case, no degree at all) struck me as a noble experiment that needs to be fine-tuned, at the very least.

And I was surprised by the choice of performers. No disrespect to the Endymion Ensemble, which presented a worthy morning of recherché chamber pieces; or the rising British singers roped in by the pianist Iain Burnside for the song recitals and by the Classical Opera Company for its tepid “tasters” (Elizabeth Atherton, Sophie Bevan, Roderick Williams and Allan Clayton the best of them) — but where were the star names to launch this exciting new venue?

Perhaps they had been hired to make the foyer announcements. Their ear-splitting, echoing and virtually indecipherable proclamations suggested that they usually do star turns every day — down the road at King’s Cross station.

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