Barbican
alexandra.coghlan
And so the Academy of Ancient Music’s triptych of Monteverdi operas at the Barbican comes to an end, three years after it began with Orfeo. If 2014’s Poppea was the cycle’s sexually-charged climax, then this Ulisse is the dark, contemplative coda – a sobering moment of morality after the victorious excesses of opera’s most venal couple.Il ritorno d’Ulisse is always a harder sell than Poppea. Virtue, chastity and constancy don’t make for quite such an obvious drama, and the opera’s structural oddities – a complicatedly large cast, an awkward final act – make it tricky to pull off. Benedict Read more ...
james.woodall
With eyes trained on sporty Rio de Janeiro once more for next year’s Olympic Games, cultural portals on to the city are bound to be offered in all sorts of places around the world. One such is Rio+Film, a new film festival at the Barbican Centre focusing exclusively on the great Brazilian city by the sea. Rio+Film is likely to have further editions elsewhere.Curator Adriana Rouanet says the “+” in the festival’s name underlines that the chosen films burrow beneath the usual image of beach, football and carnival. In the Saturday-night hot spot was Fernando Meirelles’ and Kátia Lund’s 2002 Read more ...
alexandra.coghlan
Was it when we all obediently received, then held, contemplated, then savoured, then (and only then) swallowed a single grape? Or was it as we paced solemnly round the room for the sixth time, whirling brightly coloured plastic tubing above our heads to make a whirring sound, that the penny dropped? Actually I’m fairly certain it was being exhorted, for the nth time, to “embody alertness”, to feel my “super-alert hands” that did it for me. Don’t be fooled by the marketing: Rolf Hind’s Lost in Thought is no more an opera than I am a yogi.You can talk about meaningful silences or the Japanese Read more ...
David Nice
In 2007, Jiří Bělohlávek set the distinctive seal on his leadership of the BBC Symphony Orchestra and their ongoing Mahler cycle with a riveting performance of the Third Symphony. The legacy he established of a deep, well-moulded string sound which the orchestra didn’t really have before has left its mark on his successor Sakari Oramo’s even more impassioned attempt at the most epic of all Mahler’s symphonies. We even had the same peerless trombonist, Helen Vollam, awesome in the primeval funeral marches of the first movement, amid a mix of distinguished orchestral soloists old and new. Read more ...
Peter Quantrill
The frail bridge between Baroque and Classical aesthetics was the theme for this debut UK appearance by Insula, the period-orchestra extension to Laurence Equilbey’s superb vocal ensemble accentus.With a chunky harpsichord continuo and urgent pulse, they delivered an instantly engaging response to the Miserere’s pleas for mercy and Zelenka’s relentlessly intense setting of it in which chromatic harmony is stretched on the rack and phrases are hammered in place with stabbing accents. Equilbey (profiled here by David Nice) encouraged the strongest of contrasts between a smooth legato for the Read more ...
Sebastian Scotney
Last night's perfectly-judged, superbly communicated performance of Mahler's Fourth Symphony served as a reminder that the passion, experience and astonishing musicality of 86-year-old conductor Bernard Haitink are things to be cherished and never taken for granted. The symphony, first performed in 1901, was the main work in this second of Haitink's three concerts with the LSO before they leave together for Japan.The score contains a minefield of instructions to make constant subtle and sometimes radical adjustments to the tempo. Haitink's understanding of them and how to set them instantly Read more ...
Matt Wolf
The set turns out to be the thing now that Benedict Cumberbatch's star turn in Hamlet has finally arrived, trailing in its wake a level of expectation, hysteria and scrutiny that might well have made many a lesser actor head for the hills. None of that here: Cumberbatch is on view from the opening moment – indeed, the play's first line, "Who's there?", has been reassigned to the title character so as to meet the audience's febrile anticipation head on.And yet, for much of a notably short evening (just over three hours due to some heavy cuts), you can scarcely locate the actors amid Read more ...
Thomas Rees
There was a buzz at the Barbican last night, the kind that makes you feel like a child again, a ripple of electric energy that only comes with seeing the true greats. And they don’t come much greater than Chick Corea and Herbie Hancock, two jazz legends with strikingly similar trajectories. Both cut their teeth playing with Miles, both helped determine the direction of jazz-rock fusion and, though they’re now in their mid 70s, both have continued to push the boundaries.A huge cheer went up as they took the stage, looking supremely relaxed, with Hancock thanking the crowd and Corea declaring Read more ...
Peter Quantrill
Over the past decade Krystian Zimerman and Sir Simon Rattle have created and evolved a performing idea of Brahms’s D minor piano concerto which is still remarkable for its considered weight and grimly imposing grandeur, Michelangelo’s Mosè in music.As played at the Barbican in its latest appearance, hardly so refined as in Berlin but undeniably exciting, that idea of the concerto has attenuated and intensified, not quite towards self-parody but moving ever farther from the sense of a piece from 1858, written squarely if boldly in the tradition of Beethoven by a 25-year-old composer Read more ...
Marianka Swain
In a peculiarly Beckettian development, the creative team of this Sydney Theatre Company production spent several weeks of rehearsal waiting not for Godot, but for their director. Tamás Ascher – who spotted the casting potential of Uncle Vanya co-stars Hugo Weaving and Richard Roxburgh for the 1953 absurdist classic in which nothing happens, twice – was eventually forced to withdraw, leaving company director Andrew Upton to work within the set already developed by Ascher and designer Zsolt Khell.That striking monochromatic set places the action in a post-apocalyptic wasteland, blasted tree Read more ...
Gavin Dixon
How to respond to Mahler? That was the challenge set by the London Symphony Orchestra to Edward Rushton when they commissioned him to write an opener for this programme. Rushton’s response was to take a story from a biography of Alma and spin it into an orchestral fantasy. The story goes that Alma, listening to Gustav compose the Fifth Symphony, complained about the excessive orchestration, which he then dutifully toned down.Even by Rushton’s own admission the tale is apocryphal to the point of outright fiction, but it provided a starting point for a more idiosyncratic exploration of Mahler’s Read more ...
Thomas Rees
Though they're separated by thousands of miles, Cuba and Mali share a common musical connection. Right at the heart of Cuban music lie rhythms from sub-saharan African and last night the two traditions were united once again when Havana-born piano virtuoso Roberto Fonseca (of Buena Vista Social Club fame) took the stage with Fatoumata Diawara, a Malian singer and guitarist who is fast becoming a giant of the world music scene.The pair first met when Fonseca invited Diawara to feature on his 2012 release Yo, in which he explored his own African roots. Since then they seem to have been Read more ...