Barbican
David Nice
Heavy-goods vehicles stacked with lamentations have been thundering through the Barbican Hall. Saturday's lugubrious Rachmaninov found a mid-20th-century counterpart last night in the tough elegies of Shostakovich's First Violin Concerto - apt for a dedication to those affected by the Japanese earthquake. And the tottering juggernaut of not-quite-great-but-living Russian composer Rodion Shchedrin still clogs the LSO's current season, fortunately in this case only to head a procession ending in the carnival float of what should have been Tchaikovsky's springiest symphony.Well, the Gergiev Read more ...
Sarah Kent
I can still remember the excitement of pounding the pavements of SoHo in the early 1970s. Nowadays, this part of downtown Manhattan is awash with expensive restaurants, boutiques and smart galleries, but then it was a scruffy industrial area of warehouses and sweatshops. The factories were closing and the container trucks leaving, though, and artists were gradually infiltrating and turning the huge empty spaces into studios where they often lived illicitly.Sleeping on a platform in the workshop of an industrial designer on Broome Street, I felt the thrill of being in the right place at the Read more ...
David Nice
What is it about Rachmaninov's ghost-train masterpiece The Bells and death? The BBC Symphony Orchestra last played it under the great Russian conductor Yevgeny Svetlanov, who used it as a valedictory gesture knowing he had only weeks to live. Yesterday Semyon Bychkov measured out the funeral knell of its harrowing finale with surely some thoughts of his brother and fellow conductor Yakov Kreizberg, who died on 15 March at the age of 51.Not that anyone would have realised it without foreknowledge. As one player commented in the interval, it was business as usual - which, for Bychkov, means a Read more ...
igor.toronyilalic
Sir Colin Davis's year has not been a happy one. There've been heart problems, cancellations and, during a performance of The Magic Flute at Covent Garden last month, a major fall. Last night at the Barbican Hall he faced a strenuous Beethoven programme, the Third Piano Concerto with Jonathan Biss and the Seventh Symphony, and a new work by Romanian Vlad Maistorovici. Would the 83-year old conductor have enough energy to inject proceedings with the required welly?There was as much welly as you could wish for. Understandably, he had assigned the mastery of Maistorovici's Halo to an undertsudy Read more ...
Peter Culshaw
Old joke: when is N’Dour not N’Dour? When he’s Frank Sinatra. The comparisons of the Chairman of the Board with Senegal’s biggest star may seem a bit far-fetched, but I wondered as I watched him whether there’s a current European or American star who has the sheer authority, laid-back charisma and utterly distinctive voice that Frank used to have and Youssou has. In Youssou’s case, his voice of warm honey and mahogany is one of the seven wonders of the world. As it happens, for the first few numbers, Youssou was also as lounge-musicy as I’ve ever seen him.This meandering into MOR was Read more ...
igor.toronyilalic
Sir Simon Rattle's intriguing return to the London Symphony Orchestra podium after years away threw up a curious thought: what happens after Berlin? The fate of six of his eight predecessors at the Berlin Phil has been death on the job. Was last night a first step to finding another way out? Were we witnessing an early bit of courtship and re-familiarisation with a possible post-Berlin playmate? It certainly had all the hallmarks of an early date between old friends, with its bouts of overenthusiastic passion and moments of awkward fumbling.But what an intense programme to kickstart a Read more ...
David Nice
It's rare for demanding though not, I think, unduly cynical orchestral musicians to wax unanimously lyrical about a new conducting kid on the block. But that's what happened at the 2009 Besançon International Conducting Competition when BBC Symphony players in residence placed their bets on the obvious winner, 30-year-old Kazuki Yamada. He repaid their good faith last night in a real stunner of a London debut programme featuring two very different challenges to his long-phrasing vision and the most dramatic new violin concerto I've heard in the last two decades.That's saying something given Read more ...
David Nice
Let's begin at the end. Isn't the nuns-to-the-scaffold scene which concludes Poulenc's ultimate testament of doubt and faith the deepest, most heart-wrenching finale in all opera? It even has the edge over Richard Strauss's Rosenkavalier trio and duet, in that the singers often end up in tears as well as the audience. If my eyes were dry at the end of the Guildhall School's valiant staging, that's not because the production lacked the necessary clarity, imagination and motion, nor was it due to any dearth of good voices. But clearly something wasn't quite right.Perhaps it was a question of Read more ...
igor.toronyilalic
Earlier this month something happened to me that's never happened before. Brian Ferneyhough's Sixth String Quartet roughed-up my critical faculties and left them for dead. I couldn't tell you what had happened, why, in what order, when. As it finished, small birds circled my head. So I entered Brian Ferneyhough Day yesterday at the Barbican as one would an egg-beater, knees a-knocking.I needn't have. The day was a revelation. As is usual with these BBC Symphony Orchestra composer portraits, many different ways into the composer's oeuvre were proferred. The first reductivist Read more ...
Sam Marlowe
Forked lightning glimpsed through an aeroplane window, a silken dancer spilling stars in a snow-filled sky, a dragon tattoo etched on a man’s back: we’ve grown to expect seductive alchemy of images from the work of Quebecois master of visual theatre Robert Lepage, and in his latest show he doesn’t disappoint.For all that, The Blue Dragon – which picks up the action of director, writer and actor Lepage’s Eighties breakthrough The Dragons' Trilogy 25 years on, and is co-written with a collaborator on that piece, Marie Michaud – is a comparatively distilled piece for a theatre-maker who Read more ...
igor.toronyilalic
Word was that four strings had broken in rehearsals. One had snapped only half an hour before the start of last night's Liszt-fest at the Barbican. It meant one of two things: either pianist Evgeny Kissin had finally switched off the safety-first autopilot that some had worried had taken hold of this former child prodigy. Or we had a dodgy piano. Thankfully, it was the former. The Russian was a transformed pianist in these transformative works. He had flicked the switch from autopilot to shaman. But before we got to the epic, David Copperfield-like acts of magic of the second half - Read more ...
josh.spero
It is probably a worrying sign when the computer games of your youth become the historical butt of a conceptual art joke. Digital artist Cory Arcangel, who appropriates video-game technology, repurposes and redesigns it, has installed 14 10-pin bowling computer games in the Barbican's Curve gallery, and if you remember the earliest, an Atari, you're almost certainly as obsolescent as it is.The Curve is a perfect space for this piece: the games are projected onto its long, high, smooth wall, the images 20 feet high, so you seamlessly trace the evolution of these bowling games as you wind Read more ...