The gallery is empty except for a couple of battered wooden benches styled from the design of a violin. A single speaker periodically pipes isolated musical passages performed by the same instrument. This sound is extracted from an Elgar recording on which Leon’s grandfather, a Jewish refugee, played second violin. 

The music is lost without context in the open-plan gallery dominated by the invigilators’ chatter. A series of musical ephemera from the artist’s collection half-heartedly situates the project in post-war Birmingham of the 1940s, but also too vaguely in the sprawling lineage of Beethoven, Schubert, and Vivaldi.

The gallery text finally explains the aim of this confusion: Leon believes that the symphony is “cacophonous” and wants to rescue his ancestor from the oblivion of music. He disowns the tradition in which fulfilment came from playing part in a collective, rather than individual endeavour. This could have been a tender homage, or maybe a political charge found in a life’s work. Instead, this embarrassing display indicts today’s second-fiddlers with narcissism and egomania.