Barbican
peter.quinn
How incredibly heartening that this latest edition of the BBC Symphony Orchestra's Total Immersion, focusing on the music of the contemporary Estonian composer, Arvo Pärt, sold out days in advance. Including an introduction to Pärt's music by the BBC Radio 3 presenter Sara Mohr-Pietsch, Dorian Supin's documentary film about the composer, 24 Preludes for a Fugue, a freestage event by the BBC SO Family Orchestra performing a new work inspired by Pärt's music, and three concerts, Saturday's day-long exploration provided an embarrassment of riches.The BBC Radio 3 producer who introduced the Read more ...
igor.toronyilalic
Gerald Barry's new operatic adaptation of Wilde's The Importance of Being Earnest delivers a number of firsts. The first opera score to contain an ostinato for smashed plates. The first orchestra to include a part for pistols and wellington boots. The first opera (that I know of) to offer the role of an aging mother to a male bass. And the first opera I've been to where I've cried with laughter.Granted: on paper it all sounds a bit Chuckle Brothers. Smashing plates, wellies, travesty roles aren't automatically funny at all. But like all the best jokes, these are not jokes. Barry doesn't Read more ...
Ismene Brown
Donatella Flick, one of Britain's most important arts patrons, is furious. "Madness!" she cries in her lush Italian voice. "This is a country that was fantastic, and now there's a demolition going on, bit by bit!" We're sitting in Sir Winston Churchill's old drawing room - now her drawing room - near Kensington Gardens, and I would give a lot to see David Cameron flinching on her huge black sofa as he got a withering dressing-down. Yesterday Cameron's government agreed to delay for further consideration their big new wheeze for getting the rich to pay more tax by cutting the advantages of Read more ...
igor.toronyilalic
I don't have many feelings about the Titanic (any more than I do about any tragedies of the distant past). I know few of the facts, I can remember nothing of the film and I have been left almost completely untouched by the centenary. Yet I am enormously grateful to have caught a Barbican performance of The Sinking of the Titanic, Gavin Bryars' beautiful musical meditation on the event. The reason why this hour-long rumination works so well is that it does not rely on the emotional power of the catastrophe to generate its own emotional power. The debris of sounds that Read more ...
igor.toronyilalic
It's one of the great perversities of modern cultural life that orchestras from America and Venezuela visit London more often than those from Birmingham or Manchester. A perversity and a shame, as last night's exceptional performance of Elgar's The Dream of Gerontius by the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra and CBSO Chorus on a rare visit to the Barbican showed.Not even the cancellation of their chief conductor Andris Nelsons (owing to a family illness) or Toby Spence was able to derail things. The essentials were simply too good. There's nothing quite like a first-class English orchestra Read more ...
aleks.sierz
It’s the star factor. Tickets for Big and Small, by the controversial German writer Botho Strauss, are selling fast because Cate Blanchett is in it. Her protean presence in this production by the Sydney Theatre Company, of which she is the co-artistic director, casts a glow over the whole event — she’s on stage for almost the entire running time of two and three-quarter hours. But there are other pleasures to savour here: chief of these is playwright Martin Crimp’s fresh, crisp and contemporary translation of the text.Strauss’s 1978 play — Gross und Klein — is about Lotte (Blanchett) and her Read more ...
Peter Culshaw
You may be feeling Titanic fatigue by now, the last straw being the so-so Julian Fellowes TV romp which heads, as Adam Sweeting points out elsewhere, “an epidemic of TV programmes” this week. Rather than seeing any of them, or the Cameron film epic, or even Roy Wood Baker’s 1958 melodrama A Night to Remember, can I quietly recommend the evocative and moving The Sinking of the Titanic by Gavin Bryars, which will be performed at Birmingham Town Hall on (pause for doom-laden chord) Friday the 13th and at the Barbican on the 15th, the exact centenary date.Quietly recommending seems to be the Read more ...
Marcus O'Dair and Igor Toronyi-Lalic
Sufjan Stevens is a singer-songwriter of startling scope, one minute releasing a record dedicated to the state of Illinois, the next a five-disc Christmas box set or an album for the animals of the Chinese Zodiac. Bryce Dessner is the guitarist in indie rock act The National, but also plays semi-improvised avant-folk with Clogs and works with leading classical ensembles like Kronos Quartet and Bang On A Can.Composer Nico Muhly counts among his collaborators both symphony orchestras and the likes of Bjork, Bonnie "Prince" Billy and Antony and the Johnsons. He’s written soundtracks and operas Read more ...
geoff brown
After conducting two performances of Parsifal since Saturday and one of Mahler’s Eighth Symphony, most human beings would be spending a day curled up at home. But Valery Gergiev doesn’t know what carpet slippers look like. Besides, he’s currently on tour in Britain with his Mariinsky Opera forces, and he’s conducting nothing but blockbusters. Last night, Verdi’s Requiem in London. On Good Friday, it’s the epic Parsifal again, in Birmingham. The tour finished, he’ll be back in St Petersburg by Sunday, launching the Mariinsky’s third International Piano Festival. Brisk rhythms melted into Read more ...
Peter Culshaw
The dazzling Cuban pianist Roberto Fonseca delighted a packed Barbican last night – but part of the fun was seeing him negotiate the balance between more soulful, minimal playing and sheer technically brilliant extravagance. Is he more an heir to Chucho Valdez, the consummate sophisticated Havana Jazzer, or to Ruben Gonzalez, the more lyrical pianist of the Buena Vista Social Club, into whose shoes he had the tricky task of stepping for their live tours? The set lifted off with the driving beat of the self-penned “80s”, also the opening track of his new album Yo. It enabled the Read more ...
geoff brown
Originally, this concert was to open with that mercurial wonder Martha Argerich playing an unspecified piano concerto. Then its first item became Martha Argerich not playing anything, for the good lady, almost as rare a visitor to Britain as the Man in the Moon, did what she’s famous for doing. She cancelled. Acting with award-winning panache, the Barbican then found a substitute artist who’s recently become even rarer, the violinist Maxim Vengerov. Known for his golden tone, charisma and fire, Vengerov last performed in Britain with his violin in 2007: the year of his serious shoulder Read more ...