Barbican
Sam Marlowe
It begins with a tall, thin man walking out of light and into darkness. There is much that remains murky in Barry McGovern’s adaptation of this novel by Samuel Beckett, written between 1941 and 1945 when Beckett, who had worked for the Resistance, was in the South of France on the run from the Nazis, and not published until nearly a decade after its completion. Like his later dramatic works, it is preoccupied with profound existential questions – the inconsequentiality of being, the endless groping for meaning – reduced to the simple, immediate and human: the everyday made extraordinary.This Read more ...
alexandra.coghlan
“I have nothing to say, and I am saying it. And that is poetry.” Originally delivered by John Cage at an artists’ club in New York in 1949, the composer’s Lecture On Nothing went on to become a core text within his 1961 collage-meditation of essays, Silence. Restoring it to spoken form (and thus reanimating the beautiful tensions of this un-speech, this voiced absence), Robert Wilson’s staging finds a whole new echo-chamber of resonances for a classic text muted by neglect in mainstream culture.Wilson’s affinity for the American minimalism of this period is most famously explored in his quasi Read more ...
David Nice
Orchestral volcanoes were erupting all over Europe around the year 1915. It was courageous enough to make a mountain chain out of three of them in a single concert. I was less prepared for the white-heat focus applied by that stalwart Dane Thomas Dausgaard, and completely flummoxed when he and Jian Wang, a cellist with the biggest yet most streamlined sound I’ve ever heard, made total sense of the only overblown monster on the programme, Bloch’s "Hebraic Rhapsody" Schelomo.Andrew Huth’s programme note made special claim for its “gorgeous orchestral colours”. But it’s bound to sound as thick Read more ...
Kimon Daltas
Maxim Vengerov’s four-year absence from the London stage is recent enough that any performance by him has the added value of having been clawed back from a jealous god. That a violinist of such explosive talent could have been permanently silenced by something as mundane as an injury sustained in the gym is barely thinkable, though the possibility seemed very real in the hinter years between 2008 and 2012.But back he is, and entirely on form too. That said – look away now if you deplore journalistic cliché – this was very much a concert of two halves: a solid but buttoned-up take on two early Read more ...
fisun.guner
It is often argued that Marcel Duchamp is the single most influential artist of the 20th century, and that Fountain, the porcelain urinal he signed R. Mutt and presented to the world in 1917, the single most influential artwork. But that’s not quite the whole picture. Of course, the first half of the century belongs to Picasso, and perhaps to a lesser extent that other goliath of Modernism, Matisse. We would never have had Abstract Expressionism were it not for these two vying giants of European painting. We would never have had the art world’s big leap across the Atlantic from Paris to Read more ...
Peter Culshaw
A couple of weeks ago on BBC’s Question Time one of the pundits airily commented that until recently no-one in the audience would have heard of Bamako, the capital of Mali. That wouldn’t be the case were there any world music fans there – for them, the country (perhaps only with Cuba as a rival) has the strongest and most renowned music heritage anywhere.There are more general reasons for the supremacy of Malian music, including its accessible, bluesy sounds and the fact that Francophone African music has always had a boost through Paris, the most global-music-friendly city in Europe. More Read more ...
David Nice
I laughed quite a bit going round the exhibition to which the Barbican’s latest theatre events are tied, The Bride and the Bachelors. Pioneer Marcel Duchamp’s 1921 “Readymade” Why Not Sneeze, Rrose Sélavy? is funny in itself: a metal birdcage containing marble sugarcubes with a cuttle bone and a thermometer stuck through the bars. It’s even funnier when you learn that admirer Robert Rauschenberg, about to pinch a couple of cubes on a visit to the Philadelphia Museum of Art in the late 1950s, was told by the guard, “Don’t you know you’re not supposed to touch that crap?” I laughed a lot, too, Read more ...
alexandra.coghlan
It’s not that Bernard Haitink’s tempos are universally slow, it’s just that they often feel that way. When it works the music can be magisterial, immense, but when it doesn’t you find yourself chafing against such unyielding allegiance to restraint. Last night we saw both sides of the veteran conductor, but a performance of Mozart’s Piano Concerto K453 like the one he conjured with Maria João Pires and the London Symphony Orchestra can banish the memory of any orchestral strife with the merest rococo flourish of its wrist.Pires is a transformative pianist – so familiar, so innately right, yet Read more ...
alexandra.coghlan
The Barbican is London’s home for baroque opera in concert, regularly bringing Europe’s finest over with their latest Handel and Vivaldi. But although fresh from a performance in Paris, last night’s band were definitely home-grown. Harry Bicket and the English Concert were joined by a dream-team of soloists for a performance of Handel’s Radamisto that suggested their French rivals aren’t going to have it all their own way this season.Radamisto isn’t first-tier Handel; its uneasy combination of tragic extremity and quick-fix dramatic resolution render it inadvertently comic, whatever you do Read more ...
David Nice
Is Prokofiev’s 1938 score for Alexander Nevsky the greatest film music ever written? Not quite, if only for the fact that Sergei Eisenstein’s second sound-picture glorifying historical role models for the ever more tsar-like Stalin, Ivan the Terrible, is darker and more richly textured, and the music’s greater breadth reflects that.Yet you can’t fault Prokofiev’s spirited response to every war situation in this propagandist masterpiece about the stalwart 13th century prince who sees off an invasion of Teutonic knights in a battle on a frozen lake. It was made at a time when the German threat Read more ...
igor.toronyilalic
It may look like a sure-fire hit to let Kansas mezzo Joyce DiDonato rip through the drama-queen repertoire of the Baroque. But last night’s exploration of the dustiest, most overgrown byways of 17th and 18th century Italian opera needed every drop of DiDonato’s star musical talents – not to mention those of her backing band Il Complesso Barocco – to convince us of the worth of these rarities. The audience bought it. I remain on the fence.Prepared in conjunction with that great scholar of this period, Alan Curtis, the concert didn’t disappoint in certain key respects. In mood, narrative flow Read more ...
igor.toronyilalic
“Improvisation? That?” whispered a Japanese lady to her friend at the end of the afternoon concert. She was making a good point. Half the performers in this programmed jam were glued to their scores. It was the low point of a mixed day at the Barbican Centre that began with a very enticing premise of offering to immerse us in the “Sounds from Japan”. We barely dipped our toe. The problem wasn’t simply the variability of the music; it was also the laziness of the curatorial thinking.The same five o’clock concert that offered up the bizarre improvisation began with a similarly odd introduction Read more ...