Barbican
Sarah Kent
Two performers rush down the stairs and sweep through the audience, their designer outfits splaying out as they speed elegantly around the gallery and disappear as quickly as they came. Thus begins a series of performances that are an intriguing mix of flamboyant narcissism and minimalist restraint. Borrowing from various dance and performance traditions that seem at odds with one another, Trajal Harrell creates hybrid forms that are exhilarating, strange, beautiful and uplifting. On the one hand, there’s postmodern dance developed in New York by the Judson Dance Theater group, who Read more ...
David Nice
Gorgeous sound, shame about the movement – or lack of it. That seems to be the problem with too many of Simon Rattle's interpretations of late romantic music. It gave us a sclerotic Wagner Tristan und Isolde Prelude last night, Karajanesque and not in a good way, loping along in gilded self-love before putting on a sudden spurt towards the climactic ecstasy. Fortunately the rest of the concert wasn't Strauss or Mahler, but not everything turned out well in a less than feral Bartók Second Piano Concerto – not for the most part the fault of fascinating soloist Denis Kozhukhin – and a fitfully Read more ...
james.woodall
Can The Tempest open on stage without a tempest – of crashing, shrieking and torment – and thus without what can become five minutes-plus of inaudibility? In Gregory Doran’s 2016 Stratford production for the RSC, revived at the Barbican Theatre, the answer is, as so often, no. Joe Shire, Darren Raymond and Caleb Frederick, playing mariners, have lines to deliver but against giant-wave effects and the supersonic demolition of a ship, they might as well stay mute. Not one bellowed word comes through, though Joseph Mydell as the kindly elder Gonzalo makes a good go of it.As a show starts, Read more ...
Gavin Dixon
Thomas Adès and the Britten Sinfonia here reached the most revolutionary works in their twin portrait season of Gerald Barry and Beethoven: Barry’s Chevaux-de-frise and Beethoven’s "Eroica". Adès, ever-keen to play the iconoclast, emphasised all the radical features and brought a visceral intensity to both scores. The Barry came off best, the performance yet again demonstrating the close artistic affinity between the two composers. The Beethoven was less successful – suitably dynamic but with its lyrical lines rarely given space to breath under the weight of Adès’ muscular interventions. Read more ...
alexandra.coghlan
''…after various Accidents, it comes to pass that he recovers both Her and his Kingdom”. Handel's Radamisto may be a tale of warring kingdoms, noble self-sacrifice and mature, wedded love, but it’s also a fairly daft piece of dramatic belief-suspension, whose various knotty conflicts get miraculously untangled in a brisk few bars of recitative, just in time for a rousing final chorus and whatever the ancient Armenian version is of a nice cup of tea.Director John Ramster is well aware of this, embracing the opera’s idiocies along with its musical glories in his witty new production for Read more ...
Gavin Dixon
Bernard Haitink is one of the great Bruckner conductors of our time. His interpretations are expansive yet vivid and always go straight to the heart of the music. But he is also an old man, and physical frailty is increasingly inhibiting his work, reducing the spontaneity of his communication with the orchestra. The results are both frustrating and inspiring, with details lost and clarity of texture often compromised. But he still has a firm grasp of the bigger picture, making this performance of the Te Deum and the Ninth Symphony continually compelling, for all its flaws.The Te Deum is often Read more ...
alexandra.coghlan
To hear The English Concert playing Handel is to arrive in technicolour Oz after a lifetime of black and white baroque in Kansas. We’re not short on period bands in the UK, but few bring this music into anything like the kind of focus that Harry Bicket and his crack team of musicians achieve, nor demonstrate such love and joy in the process. The solo line-up may have been starry, but the hero of this Ariodante was the orchestra.Even by Handel’s standards, the plot of Ariodante is a curious one. A happy beginning and ending frame a central conflict of disturbing darkness (a Much Ado-style Read more ...
Peter Quantrill
Made from girders, say the brewers of an infamous Scottish fizzy drink. If you could siphon the music of Edgard Varèse into a can, that’s what it would taste like. Blunt, acrid, inimitable, fizzing with closely guarded, possibly unpleasant ingredients. The danger was that exposure to his entire output in one day would prove no more palatable than chugging through a two-litre bottle of Irn-Bru.Thanks to some sensitive programming and superbly prepared performances, however, the BBC’s “Total Immersion Day” did not entail saturation. Instead, the indomitable strength of a personality, and a Read more ...
Jenny Gilbert
There is a distinctive look, feel, even sound to a stage production directed by Ivo van Hove, which is becoming rather familiar to London theatregoers after two cult hits, A View From the Bridge and Hedda Gabler. You know you’re in van Hovenland as soon as you see the modishly empty stage which before long one of the characters will trash, leaving everyone to wade through detritus for the rest of the play. Long stretches of dialogue will be underscored by music, looped so that the same cadence comes round and round again like toothache. You will also hear unnerving rhythmic sounds that can’t Read more ...
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 ...