Barbican
Rachel Halliburton
Donghoon Shin has a taste for the esoteric – a love of labyrinths, literary puzzles, and contradictory aspects of the self. One of his favourite authors is the Argentinian essayist and short-story writer, Jorge Luis Borges, whose perspective flipping explorations often feel like the verbal equivalent of art by Escher.“I loved his games of intertextuality when I was young,” he tells me on a Zoom call. “I was already fascinated by labyrinths, partly because of the video games I’d played. So it was really exciting to experience the way he used the concept and perception of the labyrinth. That Read more ...
Rachel Halliburton
So often the focus – in the coverage of a royal wedding – is the story of the woman wearing the bridal dress. While every fashion choice she makes will be scrutinised for the rest of her life, it is, nonetheless, she herself who will be mercilessly interrogated as the representative both of a nation’s ideals and its discontents.So it’s a refreshing departure that Caroline Guiela Nguyen’s ravishing, emotionally absorbing Lacrima puts its lens firmly on the dress. It’s a story that’s every bit as human as the princess herself as it reveals a whole ecosystem of workers and the pressures and Read more ...
David Nice
Antonio Pappano and the London Symphony Orchestra last seared us in Britten’s amazing Violin Concerto, with Vilde Frang as soloist, on the very eve of lockdown in 2020. The work’s dying fall then was echoed by the spectral drift ending Vaughan Williams’ Sixth Symphony. This time Frang’s equal as the greatest of violinists, Janine Jansen, faced the daunting solo role fearlessly, and the riproaring end of Shostakovich’s Tenth Symphony proved that this team is here to stay. There were telling links with Thursday’s concert, too. Britten’s emotional demands are as challenging as Read more ...
David Nice
It was a hefty evening, as it needn't necessarily have been throughout, since Shostakovich’s Ninth Symphony can conceal more darkness between the lines in a lighter take. In his second full concert of his second season as the wildly successful and popular Chief Conductor of the London Symphony Orchestra, Antonio Pappano spared us none of the hard-hitting.Nor did the phenomenal pianist Seong-Jin Cho in Prokofiev’s colossal Second Piano Concerto, drawing as usual crowds of his fellow South Koreans. It was neither Pappano's nor Cho's fault if I’d recently heard interpretations of that and Read more ...
Mark Kidel
At the start or her show, the white-robed singer Ganavya does something unusual: while other performers usually warm their audience up before suggesting they sing along, she plunges straight in, a minute or so into chanting “a love supreme”, and gets everyone to join her in what can only be described as a communal act of devotion. This is a kind of high-wire daring, and it works, suggesting as well that she's assured of a large group of listeners for whom she can do no wrong.Now well-established as a purveyor of spiritual jazz and traditional South Indian chants, born and raised in New York Read more ...
Helen Hawkins
Back in the day, when America’s late-night chat show hosts and their guests sat happily smoking as they shot the breeze for a growing audience, the most sought after guest was Oscar Levant. No longer a household name except to fans of vintage Hollywood musicals, in some of which, notably An American in Paris, he appeared, Levant (b 1906) was the Swiss Army knife of the entertainment business: a virtuoso pianist, composer, conductor, actor, a writer of hilarious memoirs, a raconteur with his own TV chat show. He was also beset with mental health problems, notably OCD, hypochondria and Read more ...
Rachel Halliburton
“I still can’t believe that some pseudo-critics continue to accuse me of having murdered tango,” Astor Piazzolla once declared. “They have it backward. They should look at me as the saviour of tango. I performed plastic surgery on it.”Thirty-three years after his death, and 70 years after he created the “new tango” – fusing the sensual dance form with such disparate elements as New York jazz, Buenos Aires dirt and baroque counterpoint – admirers including Yo-Yo Ma and Daniel Barenboim continue to hail Piazzolla’s transformative influence. Hence the anticipation around the forthcoming Read more ...
David Nice
A Salome without the head of John the Baptist is nothing new: several directors have perversely decided they could do without in recent productions. In concert, the illusion needs the charismatic force of a great soprano and conductor. We got that at the Proms 11 years ago with Nina Stemme and Donald Runnicles. Now Asmik Grigorian, even more the ideal as the obsessive teenage princess, crowns the end of a season that has been a total triumph for Pappano and his London Symphony Orchestra.I've never bought the line that Richard Strauss's incredible 1905 psychodrama to most of Oscar Wilde's text Read more ...
Fiddler on the Roof, Barbican review - lean, muscular delivery ensures that every emotion rings true
Rachel Halliburton
It’s always a risk when a production changes venue. In the curious alchemy of live performance, no-one can be sure whether a shift in surroundings might rob a show of the glitter and allure it once had.For Jordan Fein’s impassioned, magical Fiddler on the Roof that must have been doubly the case after critics raved about the ingenious way he had worked with Regent’s Park Open Air Theatre’s capricious outdoor setting. The timing of the song "Sunrise, Sunset" – marking the wedding of Tevye’s daughter Tzeitel – to fall shortly after dark was a particular cause for delight.So it’s a pleasure to Read more ...
David Nice
Three live, very alive Symphonie fantastiques in a year may seem a lot. But such is Berlioz’s precise, unique and somehow modern imagination that you can always discover something new, especially given the intense hard work on detail of Antonio Pappano and what is now very much “his” London Symphony Orchestra. They and Lisa Batiashvili also helped to keep Szymanowski’s hothouse First Violin Concerto in focus, too.There can’t be a more exhilarating curtain-up to a concert than Berlioz’s equally fertile Le Corsaire Overture. The whiplash timpani, the unison helter-skelters of strings later meet Read more ...
Bernard Hughes
Every now and then a concert programme comes along that fits like a bespoke suit, and this one could have been specially designed for me. Two established favourites from big names of the 20th century plus a new-to-me piece by a forgotten figure worthy of re-discovery.And the LSO under Susanna Mälkki didn’t disappoint in any regard: this was a great night in the Barbican hall. I came across the black American composer Julia Perry (1924-1979) a few years ago, but this was my first chance to hear her music live. There are a few black and women composers getting performed these days who, I fear, Read more ...
Giulio Cesare, The English Concert, Bicket, Barbican review - 10s across the board in perfect Handel
David Nice
Is Giulio Cesare in Egitto, to give the full title, Handel’s best and shapeliest opera? Glyndebourne’s revival of the legendary David McVicar production last year made it seem so, not least thanks to the presence of two of last night’s soloists, Louise Alder as Cleopatra and Beth Taylor as Cornelia. Highlight of 2022 was the English Concert’s more sparely presented Serse. This concert Cesare from that stable lived up to both standards.Star billing in the Barbican’s publicity was national treasure Alder (pictured below with Meili Li), and not unreasonably so: Cleopatra’s pearl necklace of Read more ...