Barbican
alexandra.coghlan
And so John Adams’s residency with the London Symphony Orchestra reaches its finale – a brisk allegro of a concert with a cheeky coda in the form of the composer’s latest orchestral work, Absolute Jest. One of contemporary music’s most articulate advocates, Adams here swapped pen for baton in a beautifully programmed concert that took a postmodern road-trip across 20th century musical America, guiding listeners along the highways of Copland’s Appalachian Spring and Ives’s Country Band March and off-road for Elliott Carter’s Variations for Orchestra.Ives’s Country Band March is Read more ...
howard.male
Bassekou Kouyaté’s ngoni looks like a real bugger to play. Its hollow body is the size and shape of a child’s cricket bat and its rounded fretless neck is thinner than that of a broomstick. It’s a mystery how anyone gets a note out of this ancestor of the banjo's four strings, never mind play the kind of galloping, coruscating solos that this Malian virtuoso gets out of it. It seems fitting to begin by talking about and celebrating the instruments and the blindingly brilliant musicians who play them, rather than the tragically complex mess that the country they come from currently finds Read more ...
David Nice
With the cuts still to bite deep, it's enterprising business as usual for both of London’s biggest concert-hall complexes and their satellite orchestras in the newly announced season to come. I use the word "complex" carefully, because as from September, the Barbican Centre, which already has access to LSO St Luke's up the road, will also be using the 608-seater hall constructed as part of its neighbouring Guildhall School of Music and Drama’s Milton Court development.The Southbank Centre will soon be able to hold its head high about one reinstated asset which the Barbican Hall sadly can’t Read more ...
David Nice
Want to learn more about 20th century music in action? Starting tomorrow, you could lose yourself in the labyrinth of the Southbank’s year-long The Rest is Noise festival, and plough your way through Alex Ross’s monumental but partisan study of that name. Or you could learn a lot in a short space of time from John Adams’s mini-residency with the LSO at the Barbican. There’s an even more essential book to read alongside it, the composer’s Hallelujah Junction, following an insider’s path to finding his own voice after encounters with the rigours of the 12-tone system, Cage-style anything-goes Read more ...
David Nice
Elgar declared a “massive hope in the future” as the human programme behind his epic First Symphony’s final exultant sprint. That hope was sprinkled like gold dust around the featured artists of this all-English concert. There are good reasons to be optimistic about the effective, colourful scores of 32-year-old Anna Clyne; we know that Benjamin Grosvenor, her junior by 12 years, is already a pianist of mercurial assurance, a real front-runner. And the BBCSO stole a march on the other London orchestras in 2013 with abundant fighting spirit, rising to the special focus demanded of them by a Read more ...
Ismene Brown
Offstage dramas made more waves than onstage, where dance-followers have much less to see, and a prospect of still less in this arid immediate future. The on-dit revolved around the Olympics ceremonies, TV dance, Michael Clark and some spectacular door-slamming by a young ballet dancer who bolstered the myth that we would all be happier if we quit an arcanely dedicated, quietly hardworking world where we were notably appreciated by the team, in order to take quick riches, dubious star vehicles and avid media spotlights. Sergei Polunin's complicated departure from the Royal Ballet was one of Read more ...
Roderic Dunnett
Valery Gergiev’s exploration of the music of Karol Szymanowski is one of the most vitalising series mounted at the Barbican in recent years - to compare, say, with Sir Colin Davis’s Sibelius and Berlioz, Michael Tilson Thomas’s tributes to Leonard Bernstein, or Gergiev’s own Shostakovich and (increasingly) Prokofiev.The first point, and Gergiev himself is in no doubt about this, is that Szymanowski belongs right up there with the best of them. An uncredited introductory note (the others, pithy and perceptive, are by Polish-Russian specialist Adrian Thomas) rightly points out that Szymanowski Read more ...
Roderic Dunnett
Valery Gergiev is a human dynamo. Even before embarking on the latest tranche of his (slightly curious) pairing of Szymanowski and Brahms with the London Symphony Orchestra, of which he has been principal conductor since 2007, at the Barbican, the man who is arguably not just a musical but a socio-political force in his native country and music director of the most famous opera and ballet company in the world was down that morning at the Russian Embassy in London, promoting his plans for a whole new complex (Mariinsky 2), which from May next year will dramatically enhance the prospects of an Read more ...
Peter Culshaw
Philip Glass is sufficiently famous that his 75th Birthday celebrations have been going on all year (he was actually 75 in January) and the year saw two of the absolute highlights of his career presented at the Barbican. His first opera Einstein On The Beach and last night, the soundtrack to his first film score Koyaanisqatsi, performed alongside the film itself, with Glass on keyboards. More of his “greatest hits” will be performed at the Union Chapel in Islington tonight.There will be those who remain implacably opposed to what they see as his facile repetitive argeggios and are inclined to Read more ...
alexandra.coghlan
If you’ve ever wondered what a bad day at the office looked like for Handel then look no further than Belshazzar – an oratorio that positively demands heavenly intervention and possibly a bit of smiting. With a first act that worried even the composer with its length, a confused magpie plot and a libretto whose worst excrescences outdo even those of Congreve’s Semele, it’s one of those neglected works that gain little by being dragged out into the light, even by such distinguished champions as William Christie and Les Arts Florissants.Which is a shame, because it’s a rare delight these days Read more ...
alexandra.coghlan
Say what you like about America, but it certainly knows how to turn out an opera diva. While the Russians and even Italians can be chilly and untouchable in their splendour, there’s a cultivated ease with the likes of Renée Fleming and Joyce DiDonato that allows a song recital to be both a relaxed conversation with an old friend and a piece of highly crafted technical showmanship. It’s artifice and artistry of the highest order – not just making it all look easy, but showing us just enough mechanics to prove that it definitely isn’t.The Barbican Hall isn’t a natural venue for a song recital, Read more ...
David Nice
Her Majesty was making a rare concert-hall appearance to present the Queen’s Medal for Music, and any little Englanders in the audience might have been tempted to link royalty to Elgar’s Enigma Variations. But conductor Robin Ticciati, with a generosity and wisdom beyond his 29 years, raised this orchestral masterpiece to the universal level it deserves. Elgar’s "friends pictured within" trod air and revealed every aspect of their often shy, beautiful souls.It should come as no surprise that the score transcends labels of nationality, provinciality even. After all, what is "Nimrod" but the Read more ...