Barbican
alexandra.coghlan
The confidence trick to end all tricks, Ben Jonson’s The Alchemist is so utterly recognisable, so clearly contemporary, that to update the setting feels a bit like underlining the point in red pen. In this transfer from Stratford's Swan Theatre director Polly Findlay plays things 17th-century straight, allowing her audience to make the connection with just a little help from an irreverent new epilogue.The year is 1610 and plague has driven the wealthy away from London to their country estates, leaving the city and their possessions in charge of the underclass – servants, clerks, whores and Read more ...
alexandra.coghlan
What price a human soul? That’s the question Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus asks – a question whose answers are rooted in faith and theology. But in a society with little use for faith and still less for theology, how do you reframe the question? Director Maria Aberg offers a deft if not always entirely coherent answer in her breathless, punky take on the play for the RSC.In this monologue of an age, an era in thrall to the selfie and the narcissistic navel-gazing of the blogosphere, our ambitions and loves are turned inwards, but also our fears. It follows that a contemporary Faustus is fascinated Read more ...
Sarah Kent
A neon sign over the Barbican’s Silk Street entrance reads Scandinavian Pain. Following its victory over us in Euro 16, it seems that Iceland is now drenching us with its special brand of melancholy. Things are not that simple, of course. In his work, Icelandic artist Ragnar Kjartansson indulges his penchant for sorrow with such bitter sweetness that, with many a gentle sigh, emotional pain morphs into something more akin to pleasure.In any case, he is hard pressed to distinguish real emotion from its ersatz other, since he was born into an acting dynasty and, as a child, spent many hours Read more ...
Sebastian Scotney
A couple of hours of certainty really were very welcome during referendum week, and Murray Perahia did indeed bring clarity, poise, and an unquestioned masterpiece – Beethoven's Hammerklavier Sonata – to a full Barbican Hall last night. And not a single note of music written after 1893.The finest moments of truth and revelation in this recital with a first half of Haydn, Mozart and Brahms, and then the Hammerklavier in the second, were the slow movements. There was a serene beauty about the A major Andante cantabile con espressione of Mozart’s A minor Piano Read more ...
james.woodall
The Holland Festival is one of the greats. It has a British director, the articulate Ruth Mackenzie, formerly of the Chichester Festival and the cultural Olympiad, now into her second year. It’s the same age as Edinburgh and Avignon – 70 in 2017 – but not as well known, though it should be. “We must,” Mackenzie says, “seriously punch above our weight. And we do.” The festival was founded after the Second World War on, comparable to the Scottish and French ones, principles of reconciliation and presenting the best productions of the human spirt.Every June many opulent, and some rather more Read more ...
David Nice
Britten fathomed Phaedra's passion for her stepson in a shattering quarter of an hour's dramatic cantata. Euripides' Hippolytus takes about 90 minutes in the playing. Director Kryzsztof Warlikowski's fantasia on the Phaedra myth is more than twice that long, but it's worth every riveting or disconcerting minute thanks largely – but by no means exclusively – to the encyclopedic range of Isabelle Huppert."Star vehicle" may be a term at odds with this sort of total ensemble theatre, but that's in part what it is for Huppert (pictured below). This is a triptych like no Read more ...
David Nice
Anger and fear in Elgar, introspection in middle-period Beethoven: these are undervalued qualities in each composer’s music. Yet such moods were vividly present in two hyper-nuanced interpretations last night. It was easy to believe that no other solo violinist in the world today strikes a finer balance between sweet tone in the upper register and overall strength than Nikolaj Znaider; and on this evidence it sounded as if Antonio Pappano, a perfect concerto partner and a master of symphonic light and shade, might have made an even better choice of LSO Music Director than Simon Rattle.The Read more ...
Gavin Dixon
Sakari Oramo devised a bold programme for the final concert of the BBC Symphony Orchestra season: a new work from a young British composer, a popular but knotty violin concerto and an obscure pacifist oratorio. There were few obvious connections between the works, but all proved satisfying, not least for the excellent playing of the orchestra itself.Joseph Phibbs has had a presence on the London orchestral scene for over a decade, going back to his Last Night of the Proms commission in 2003. His previous London orchestral premiere, Rivers to the Sea, was given by Esa-Pekka Salonen and the Read more ...
Peter Quantrill
Laid low by a bug, Daniel Harding had to withdraw at the last minute from conducting the LSO last night. Booked as the soloist, Leif Ove Andsnes stepped into the breach to lead Mozart’s Piano Concerto No 20 from the piano, as the composer would have done. His unruffled keyboard technique and unimpeachably neat phrasing betrayed no sign of hasty preparation. Unfortunately they also barely scratched beneath the surface of a dark and troubled work that grabbed Romantic imaginations at a time when so much other Mozart was brushed off as Rococo plasterwork.No 20 shares its key of D minor with Don Read more ...
David Nice
Banished from the Barbican are the hollow kings of the mediocre RSC Henrys IV and V. In their place comes a whole new procession of living, breathing monarchs in a vision that's light years away from bad heritage Shakespeare. Doyen of Dutch-Belgian - and world - theatre Ivo van Hove has filleted Henry V, the three Henry VI plays and Richard III to create his own trilogy of Greek-tragedy leanness and power, focusing above all on the totally different characters of three men making crucial decisions in times of civil, internecine and international war. Shakespeare, whose language remains intact Read more ...
Peter Quantrill
Last and most imposing of Bruckner’s completed symphonies, the Eighth invites and frequently receives architectural comparisons. Such talk of pillars and cathedrals could only be wide of the mark in the wake of this unconventional, beautifully prepared and deeply humane performance by the London Symphony Orchestra and their principal conductor designate, Sir Simon Rattle.Over a span of 80-plus minutes, Bruckner transforms a double-dotted, death-watch tattoo in C minor into unanswerably emphatic C major. As ever, the destination is less important than the journey. The tempi were flexible, so Read more ...
Gavin Dixon
Masaaki Suzuki’s reputation precedes him. His recordings of Bach’s choral works with Bach Collegium Japan, the group he founded in 1990, have been arguably the finest of recent decades. But visits to the West, and especially to London, are rare, so this evening’s concert offered a valuable opportunity to find out what the dynamics are within the ensemble, and how they achieve such impressive results on disc.Unlike many Bach interpreters, Suzuki is a real conductor. He doesn’t play violin or harpsichord when he leads, he actually conducts. He takes an interest in every detail of the music, Read more ...