Barbican
Komsi, BBC Symphony Orchestra, Oramo, Barbican HallSaturday, 29 October 2011
With Riccardo Chailly's Leipzig Beethoven series well into its capacious stride, another cycle of symphonies keeping unusual company begins. This one featuring the BBC Symphony Orchestra will take longer and features six conductors, four of them... Read more... |
Beethoven Cycle, Concert 2: Leipzig Gewandhaus, Chailly, Barbican HallWednesday, 26 October 2011
Of all the Beethoven symphonies the Seventh is the one that can seem to whizz along under its own steam. At any rate, the impression Riccardo Chailly gave last night was of having fine-tuned his sleek Leipzig machine, turning on the engine and... Read more... |
Beethoven Cycle, Concert 1: Leipzig Gewandhaus, Chailly, Barbican HallTuesday, 25 October 2011
There are many ways of breathing new life into Beethoven. Carlos Kleiber used to do it through imagery. He once famously asked his Viennese double basses to play like monkeys during a rehearsal of Beethoven's Seventh. Riccardo Chailly's tactic for... Read more... |
The music man who kept them dogies rollin'Tuesday, 25 October 2011
On Thursday the London Symphony Orchestra plays a night of epic movie music by the man who gave America’s cowboy heroes their most stirring tunes. Dimitri Tiomkin was one of Hollywood’s film-score giants, John Wayne’s choice as composer for The... Read more... |
Dmitri Hvorostovsky, Ivari Ilja, Barbican HallSaturday, 22 October 2011
Tchaikovsky songs, the most obvious missing link in Olga Borodina's all-Russian programme a couple of Fridays back, formed a spare but unforgettable apex to this second recital in the Barbican's Great Performers series. That in itself, and unusual... Read more... |
Lucinda Childs Dance Company, Barbican TheatreWednesday, 19 October 2011
There are various disinterments of supposedly iconic dance-makers going on in this year's Dance Umbrella (some live ones more dead than the dead ones), but no one is going to beat for sheer éclat Lucinda Childs’ astonishingly beautiful minimalist... Read more... |
Andsnes, BBCSO, Bělohlávek, Barbican HallThursday, 13 October 2011
Pundits have always yoked architecture and Bruckner together, touting void and mass at the expense of the dynamic experience music ought to be. Abbado and his Lucerne Festival Orchestra favoured sinuous instability in the Fifth Symphony earlier this... Read more... |
Britten War Requiem, London Symphony Orchestra, Noseda, Barbican HallMonday, 10 October 2011
Nearly 50 years have passed since Britten’s War Requiem premiered at the consecration of the reconstructed Coventry Cathedral in May 1962. The intervening years have seen British military campaigns in the Falklands, Iraq, Afghanistan and Libya, and... Read more... |
Wayne Shorter Quartet, BarbicanSunday, 09 October 2011
Wayne Shorter's current band do strange things with time - it seems to stretch and bend like in some subatomic experiment featuring rogue neutrinos. Their nifty time signatures would fuse any computer. The nature of the music itself seems outside... Read more... |
Olga Borodina, Dmitri Yefimov, Barbican HallSaturday, 08 October 2011
In Italian opera, where lustrous Verdi mezzos are rare indeed, Olga Borodina tends to a first-the-music-then-the-words approach. In Russian song, the sole focus of last night's Barbican recital until the second encore, her classy, naturally... Read more... |
Merce Cunningham Dance Company, Barbican TheatreFriday, 07 October 2011
Any newcomers to Merce Cunningham who visit the last performances ever in Britain of his modern dance company - renowned, even notorious, for its abstruse abstractness - will surely go away with an impression of laughter, playfulness, the lightness... Read more... |
Ecstatic Journey, BarbicanThursday, 29 September 2011
The final night of the Barbican’s adventurous if slightly awkwardly named Transcender season was a Sufi safari, with a tapas selection of four very different artists from assorted Islamic countries giving a taste of their music.First up, making... Read more... |
