Barbican
Singcircle, Barbican review - veteran ensemble bids farewell with StockhausenTuesday, 21 November 2017
STIMMUNG is always an event. Stockhausen’s score calls for a ritual as much as a performance, with six singers sitting around a spherical light on a low table, the audience voyeurs at some intimate but unexplained rite. Singcircle has been... Read more... |
Robert Glasper, Barbican review - emotional fellowship and creative interconnectionsSaturday, 18 November 2017
As moments of transcendence go, Laura Mvula’s guest spot at Robert Glasper’s EFG London Jazz Festival show provided one of the year’s most transporting musical moments.Powered by the huge harmonic slabs carved out by keyboardist Travis Sayles and... Read more... |
Coriolanus, Barbican review - great, late Shakespeare compels but doesn't stunMonday, 13 November 2017
Coriolanus is post-tragic. It never horrifies like Macbeth or appals like King Lear, though its self-damaging protagonist is disconcerting enough. Shakespeare had written the signature dark dramas by 1606, including the most magnificent of the four... Read more... |
An Evening with Pat Metheny, Barbican - sheer joy under the Missouri skySaturday, 11 November 2017
Pat Metheny recently described quite how much he enjoys just being on stage: “As Phil Woods used to say, the concert, that's for free. What the promoter is paying for is getting on the plane, getting off the plane, to pack your suitcase. The actual... Read more... |
LSO, Alsop, Barbican review - Bernstein 100 opens not with celebrations but existential angstMonday, 06 November 2017
Amen. The end – of a prayer, a service, even the Bible itself. But what, asks Leonard Bernstein’s Symphony No 3, Kaddish, if “Amen” is the beginning and not the end, the start of a conversation that hears the divine word and doesn’t say “So be it”... Read more... |
BBCSO, Storgårds, Barbican review – Jolas intrigues, Mahler 4 disappointsSaturday, 04 November 2017
Betsy Jolas is a pioneer, the programme for this BBC Symphony Orchestra concert told us, and she’s certainly unique. Now 91, she has been following her own course for many decades, an associate of the 1960s French avant-garde, but never a subscriber... Read more... |
The Consul, Guildhall School review - blowsy melodrama rooted by committed studentsTuesday, 31 October 2017
Fancy that: the day after the last major Menotti staging I can remember in the UK, The Medium at the Edinburgh Festival, "splendid piece of post-Puccinian grand guignol" turned up in two different reviews (moral: don't discuss the performance with... Read more... |
Bavouzet, BBCSO, Oramo, Barbican review - playing the long game in SibeliusSaturday, 28 October 2017
Perhaps Sibelius did the right thing, signing off Tapiola in 1926 and then all but closing his account, spending the next three decades sitting and drinking. Over in Paris, his near-contemporary Florent Schmitt carried on, beavering away not only as... Read more... |
October, LSO, Strobel, Barbican review - Eisenstein with steel scoreFriday, 27 October 2017
Forget the ersatz experience of Sergey Eisenstein's mighty silent films accompanied by slabs of Shostakovich symphonies composed years later. This collaboration between the London Symphony Orchestra and Kino Klassika is as close as we can ever come... Read more... |
Total Immersion: Julian Anderson, Barbican review - BBC ensembles showcase leading British composerMonday, 23 October 2017
Julian Anderson’s 50th birthday this year was the prompt for the latest of the BBC’s Total Immersion days, devoted to the work of a single contemporary composer. I have long been a fan of Anderson’s music since hearing the marvellous Khorovod in the... Read more... |
Michael Clark Company, Barbican Theatre review - bad boy of dance comes goodSaturday, 21 October 2017
If there were an arts award for loyalty, the Barbican Theatre would surely win it for having kept faith with Michael Clark. It’s no secret that the bad-boy image that has clung to Clark since his punk extravaganzas in the 1980s had consequences in... Read more... |
BBCSO, Brabbins, Barbican review - commanding vistas of earth and seaSaturday, 14 October 2017
Dances of earth and songs of sea – the BBC Symphony Orchestra's latest programme offered an inspired coupling, where similar inspirations balanced contrasting styles. In a gritty first half, Birtwistle’s Earth Dances played out over a continuous 40-... Read more... |
