Barbican
alexandra.coghlan
Schubert’s winter wanderer had Wilhelm Muller to voice his despair, while Schumann’s poet-in-love had Heinrich Heine. The lovers of Hugo Wolf’s Italienisches Liederbuch must make do with only the words of anonymous Italian authors, albeit dressed up for the salon in elegant German translations by Paul Heyse. The difference is telling, and for all Wolf’s harmonic ingenuity, his cruel, clever wit and the giddy emotional range we traverse in these 46 musical miniatures, they remain fragments – a glittering, tessellated sequence that conceals little behind its shining surface.In some ways it’s Read more ...
Jansen/Maisky/Argerich Trio, Barbican review - three classical titans give chamber music masterclass
alexandra.coghlan
They were billed as a Trio, but when the classical super-group of Janine Jansen, Mischa Maisky and Martha Argerich came together at the Barbican last night it was in a sequence of different combinations, each with their own musical identity. The centre of gravity, however, remained constant. Martha Argerich, the only performer present throughout, may have reinvented herself and her sound fifty times in the course of the evening, now asserting, now effacing, but it was she who rooted the whole, who provided the fixed compass point around which her colleagues roamed so freely.The alchemy of Read more ...
Jessica Duchen
You could probably guess from the assembling audience that the orchestra making its Barbican debut last night came from Milan. That many mink coats rarely congregate in a London concert hall. And under the baton of its music director Riccardo Chailly, the Filarmonica della Scala – vastly more than the house band of Italy’s most famous opera house – delivered an evening of luxurious sophistication, dressing over-familiar repertoire in haute couture that made some oft-maligned masterpieces shine out like Cinderella on her way to the ball.La Scala’s seemingly unrufflable players, under Chailly’s Read more ...
David Nice
This was an evening of Iberian highways re-travelled, but with a difference. At the beginning of 2016, the centenary of Spanish master Enrique Granados's untimely death, two young pianists at the National Gallery shared the two piano suites that make up the original Goyescas; finally last night at the Barbican we got the opera partly modelled on their deepest movements. And back in 2008 Josep Pons and the BBC Symphony Orchestra brandished the revised, full-orchestral 1925 ballet score of Manuel de Falla's El amor brujo rather than the intriguing chamber orchestra original, making a virtue out Read more ...
Peter Quantrill
Cheers and huzzahs greeted the arrival of Sir Simon Rattle on the Barbican stage last night before the London Symphony Orchestra had even played a note. The 10-day festivities to open his tenure as principal conductor evidently worked a treat. The hall was full for a lengthy and – on the surface of it – unlikely splicing of Austrian Romantic angst with Baroque arias and dance.Joy and woe were woven fine throughout, but especially so in a tenderly moulded account of Schubert’s "Unfinished" Symphony. Rattle views the “Unfinished” in the context of a prose vision of paternal rejection and Read more ...
David Nice
Twelfth Night, Epiphany, call it what you will, is one reminder that there's continuity after the turn of the year. Another was Sakari Oramo's final Sibelius-plus concert with the BBC Symphony Orchestra - a predictable triumph given that the previous four were all highlights of 2017, capping, at least for me, the "Rattle Returns" experience. Though an "in the beginning" myth was part of the programme, it seemed odd to start with the end, the miraculous one-movement Seventh Symphony. Still, C major marks a good way to kick off at the Barbican in January.That said, the symphony is rare, if not Read more ...
Jessica Duchen
The “concert drama” is on the up, offering audiences a mingled-genre means to experience music and its context simultaneously. The author and singer Clare Norburn has an absolute peach of a story to tell in the "imagined testimony of Carlo Gesualdo, composer and murderer," the legendary musician who knifed to death his wife and her lover upon catching them in flagrante.Norburn's Breaking the Rules received its London premiere on Saturday (it has been performed before in various other venues) in the splendid new festival Baroque at the Edge, and it shows us the composer, on the last day Read more ...
David Nice
Did Simon Rattle's return to the UK as Principal Conductor of the London Symphony Orchestra live up to the hype? Mostly, and when it did, the music-making was superbly alive. But it's vital to observe that another orchestra and chief conductor have been carrying on equally important and sometimes groundbreaking work in the same hall. The two other main London orchestras over at the Southbank, and the rest around the UK, all in excellent hands, have continued to deliver at the highest level. We're currently living in the strongest times, artistically speaking, for classical music across the Read more ...
james.woodall
Live theatre, eh? It had to happen. On press night a sound of what seemed to be snoring (the production’s really not dull) revealed, in the Barbican stalls, a collapse. About an hour in, a huge amount of blood is smeared over Titus Andronicus’s raped and mutilated daughter Lavinia (Hannah Morrish, pictured below with Sean Hart as Demetrius): hands lopped off, tongue cut out. A bearded man three rows behind me was carried by neighbours from his seat to, one hopes, the onward attentions of St John’s Ambulance. This is a peculiar phenomenon. Shakespeare’s sophomoric and not entirely self- Read more ...
Gavin Dixon
Leonard Bernstein is 100 already. Actually, he’s not – his centenary falls in 2018, but the LSO, an orchestra he conducted many times, is building up to the anniversary with a series of concerts featuring his three symphonies. This performance of the Second completed the cycle, but the concert also showcased another side of Bernstein’s work with Wonderful Town, one of his early Broadway shows. It was cut down to a concert version, but was still an all-singing, all-dancing extravaganza, regularly overspilling the packed Barbican stage.The big news in the first half was a rare appearance by the Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
Is there a key to “infinite variety”? The challenge of Cleopatra is to convey the sheer fullness of the role, the sense that it defines, and is defined by only itself: there’s no saying that the glorious tragedy of the closing plays itself out, of course, but its impact surely soars only when the ludic engagements of the first half have drawn us in equally. Monarchs, in the words of Shakespeare’s contemporary John Webster, may “brook no contradiction”, but this Egyptian Queen practically demands it – including self-contradiction, most of all. In Antony and Cleopatra we have a heroine who is Read more ...
David Nice
After Sakari Oramo's dazzling Sibelius rattlebag with the BBC Symphony Orchestra on the centenary day of Finnish independence, things weren't looking so good for Esa-Pekka Salonen and the Philharmonia at half time last Thursday (★★★). Then along came the Four Lemminkäinen Legends, an early Sibelius masterpiece teeming with invention and strangeness, long a Salonen speciality. Salonen's own compositions have that ambition on steroids, at least since he discovered California after taking up the reins of the Los Angeles Philharmonic in 1992. Oramo's championship of his fellow Finn, seven years Read more ...