Barbican
David Nice
Bomb-dropping is the new black again in Trump's dysfunctional America. Awareness of that contributed to the crackling cloud of dynamic dread hanging over last night's concert staging of John Adams's opera-oratorio - my description, not his - about the July 1945 desert testing of the plutonium bomb under the supervision of self-divided Robert Oppenheimer, an American Faust. But then the music's insistent stepwise descents towards the centre of the earth, in various modes and illuminated colours, the claustrophobic volume of much of the variegated score in the no-escape close-ups of the Read more ...
Peter Culshaw
Caetano Veloso is a unique figure in world popular music. As bright as the likes of David Byrne and Brian Eno, but also a genuine pop star, beloved by “chamber maids and taxi drivers” as well as the intellectual liberal élite. In the late 1960s, he reinvented Brazilian pop music with friends like Gilberto Gil in the Tropicalismo movement. He went into exile to London in the 1970s during the time of the dictatorship, played with androgyny at a time when that was subversive, wrote some of the best songs anywhere of the last few decades and has a unique, pliable, immensely expressive Read more ...
Gavin Dixon
François-Xavier Roth is a distinctive presence at the podium. He is short and immaculately attired, and first appearances could lead you to expect a civilised and uneventful evening. But the facade soon drops. His movements are brisk and erratic, as he conducts without a baton and instead shakes his outstretched hands at the players. He often leaps into the air, landing in a fierce pose directed at one of the players, before returning to his repertoire of small, indistinct gestures.Yet the results are impressively detailed and precise. Rhythmic clarity is a hallmark of his interpretations, Read more ...
David Nice
Not your usual blockbuster for Holy Week, this. In other words, neither of the Bach Passions but a Requiem, and not – these days, at any rate – one of the more often-performed ones (it's not among the 79 works listed in The BBC Proms Guide to Great Choral Works). Dvořák's laments and optimisms may not soar as consistently as Verdi's, but the (late) style is invariably the man here, and the pay-off for a broken back in the early stages is a bigger healing later on and a final cathartic lament. Certainly no conductor could be more devoted to Dvořák's steady wonders than the great Jiří Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
This is a well-travelled Winter’s Tale. Declan Donnellan has long been a director who's as much at home abroad as he is in the UK, and with co-production support here coming pronouncedly from Europe (there's American backing, too), Cheek by Jowl have made it abundantly clear where they stand on the issue of the day. Their version of Shakespeare's greatest romance reaches the Barbican’s Silk Street Theatre after a frenetic touring schedule that began in Paris more than a year ago, with further voyages beckoning. When it comes to travelling light, Nick Ormerod’s spare design must have been of Read more ...
David Nice
John Adams, greatest communicator among living front-rank composers, zoomed into the follow-spot for the second and third concerts of the New York Philharmonic's Barbican mini-residency. Harmonielehre, his first epic symphony in all but name, and The Chairman Dances, preliminary study for the nostalgic-cum-violent foxtrot of the Maos in Act Three of Nixon in China, are already repertoire staples, while Absolute Jest for string quartet and orchestra is about to become one; this was its third performance in London since 2013. Even so, the spotlighting was bold for a high-profile tour, Read more ...
Gavin Dixon
Alan Gilbert chose a surprisingly low-key programme to open the New York Philharmonic’s three-day Barbican residency, Bartók’s genre-defying Music for Strings, Percussion and Celesta and Mahler’s modest Fourth Symphony. But it proved an engaging combination, and showed off many of the orchestra’s great strengths. Gilbert himself led with a steady hand, although his tempos were often propulsive, and even if some of the Mahler felt superficial, there were many moments of magic, especially in the last two movements, welcome reminders of the orchestra’s considerable form with this music.Bartók’s Read more ...
Bernard Hughes
In musical performance, if you get the start right and the end right, you can get away with a lot in between. In last night’s LSO concert under François-Xavier Roth there was a mixed bag of more and less successful beginnings and endings, but lots of fine playing sandwiched in the middle.Mahler was only 24 when he began work on his first symphony, but it is a work of astonishing ambition and mastery for such a young composer. It originally had a detailed programme note narrating the story behind the music, and a descriptive name: “Titan”. By the time of the revised version Mahler had thought Read more ...
David Nice
It felt good to be encountering Shakespeare at his most political with a world event to smile about, for once (hailing, of course, from this brilliant Dutch company's homeland). It felt even better to emerge six hours later spellbound and deeply moved by the triumph of the personal, albeit in a kind of love-death, after so many power-games. Thrust voluntarily onstage to witness some of those conferences, even at close quarters you couldn't see the joins in the performances of Ivo van Hove's ensemble. This is not so much acting as being, or so it seems.Those who'd seen the first Barbican Read more ...
alexandra.coghlan
Marian devotions have given us some of sacred music’s most striking works, from graceful Ave Marias to anguished settings of the Stabat Mater. Andreas Scholl and musicologist Bernardo Ticci have recently gone in search of some less familiar ones – companion pieces for Vivaldi’s theatrical Stabat Mater, which has long been part of Scholl’s concert repertoire. They have emerged with a rich handful of works from 18th century Naples. Music by Porpora, Vinci and Anfossi makes for a varied, if rather fragmented, evening.While the speaker of the Stabat Mater (set here both by Vivaldi) watches the Read more ...
Gavin Dixon
A new opera from Peter Eötvös is a major event. More than any other composer today, he has the ability to create sophisticated contemporary music that supports and enriches sung drama. This concert presented the UK premiere of his Senza sangue, a short, one-act work for just two singers and orchestra. It proved an ideal vehicle of the composer’s unique talents, and the work was given an excellent performance by conductor Simone Young and the BBC Symphony Orchestra.Eötvös himself is also a conductor, and Bartók’s Bluebeard’s Castle is central to his repertoire. Senza sangue is intended as a Read more ...
David Nice
It's official: if you want to be guaranteed an infallible musical adrenalin boost in London, you can always be sure to find it with Finnish conductor Sakari Oramo and his BBC Symphony Orchestra. And it's not just a question of splashy excitement: Oramo is a rigorous rehearser. Detlev Glanert's fiendish new tone poem Megaris would not have been half as vivid or pleasurable without extraordinary preparation. As for Nielsen and Sibelius, there is no conductor in the world I'd rather hear today in their music than Oramo.This was a concert of journeys, sea-girt in the first half, with plenty of Read more ...