Barbican
The Importance of Being Earnest, Barbican HallFriday, 27 April 2012
Gerald Barry's new operatic adaptation of Wilde's The Importance of Being Earnest delivers a number of firsts. The first opera score to contain an ostinato for smashed plates. The first orchestra to include a part for pistols and wellington boots.... Read more... |
Q&A Special: Arts Patron Donatella FlickTuesday, 17 April 2012
Donatella Flick, one of Britain's most important arts patrons, is furious. "Madness!" she cries in her lush Italian voice. "This is a country that was fantastic, and now there's a demolition going on, bit by bit!" We're sitting in Sir Winston... Read more... |
The Sinking of the Titanic, Gavin Bryars Ensemble, Philip Jeck, Barbican HallTuesday, 17 April 2012
I don't have many feelings about the Titanic (any more than I do about any tragedies of the distant past). I know few of the facts, I can remember nothing of the film and I have been left almost completely untouched by the centenary. Yet I am... Read more... |
The Dream of Gerontius, City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra, Gardner, BarbicanSunday, 15 April 2012
It's one of the great perversities of modern cultural life that orchestras from America and Venezuela visit London more often than those from Birmingham or Manchester. A perversity and a shame, as last night's exceptional performance of Elgar's The... Read more... |
Big and Small, Barbican TheatreSunday, 15 April 2012
It’s the star factor. Tickets for Big and Small, by the controversial German writer Botho Strauss, are selling fast because Cate Blanchett is in it. Her protean presence in this production by the Sydney Theatre Company, of which she is the co-... Read more... |
Gavin Bryars on The Sinking of the TitanicWednesday, 11 April 2012
You may be feeling Titanic fatigue by now, the last straw being the so-so Julian Fellowes TV romp which heads, as Adam Sweeting points out elsewhere, “an epidemic of TV programmes” this week. Rather than seeing any of them, or the Cameron film epic... Read more... |
Sufjan Stevens, Bryce Dessner & Nico Muhly, BarbicanTuesday, 10 April 2012
Sufjan Stevens is a singer-songwriter of startling scope, one minute releasing a record dedicated to the state of Illinois, the next a five-disc Christmas box set or an album for the animals of the Chinese Zodiac. Bryce Dessner is the guitarist in... Read more... |
Verdi Requiem, Mariinsky Orchestra and Chorus, Gergiev, Barbican HallThursday, 05 April 2012
After conducting two performances of Parsifal since Saturday and one of Mahler’s Eighth Symphony, most human beings would be spending a day curled up at home. But Valery Gergiev doesn’t know what carpet slippers look like. Besides, he’s currently on... Read more... |
Efterklang UK dates with Northern SinfoniaThursday, 29 March 2012Denmark’s experimental art-pop trio have announced their only UK dates of 2012. They will perform music from their forthcoming album Piramida as an expanded six piece (including long-time collaborator Peter Broderick) and will be accompanied by the... Read more... |
Roberto Fonseca, BarbicanTuesday, 27 March 2012
The dazzling Cuban pianist Roberto Fonseca delighted a packed Barbican last night – but part of the fun was seeing him negotiate the balance between more soulful, minimal playing and sheer technically brilliant extravagance. Is he more an heir to... Read more... |
Vengerov, St Petersburg Philharmonic Orchestra, Temirkanov, Barbican HallSunday, 25 March 2012
Originally, this concert was to open with that mercurial wonder Martha Argerich playing an unspecified piano concerto. Then its first item became Martha Argerich not playing anything, for the good lady, almost as rare a visitor to Britain as the Man... Read more... |
AUKSO Chamber Orchestra, Penderecki, Barbican HallFriday, 23 March 2012
I don't much like aspirational music-making. I like my classical classical and my pop pop. Give me Boulez over Bernstein, Britney over Radiohead, any day. Having said that, I'd heard a piece by Jonny Greenwood at Reverb last month that had gone some... Read more... |
