Barbican
David Nice
It began with a sense of wonder, not just from the Barbican's socially distanced audience but also from the stage, at “that sound you make with your hands”, as Simon Rattle put it in what he said was a novelty speech before a performance. What followed was a celebration – reacquaintance with the instruments of the orchestra in Britten’s brilliant set of variations and a fugue on a Purcell theme, wistful beauty from Fauré, rumbustiousness with a dash of poignancy from Dvořák.Perhaps The Young Person’s Guide to the Orchestra should be renamed Everyone’s Guide to Orchestral Delights, which come Read more ...
Peter Quantrill
The drunkard in spring; the lonely man in autumn; the long goodbye. Mahler’s last song-cycle often seems to embody solitude; a resigned, earthly counterpart to the transcendent rapture of his previous work, the Eighth Symphony, as a superstitious talisman to ward off the finality of a Ninth. Last night at the Barbican, however, in their first performance back at their much-maligned home, the London Symphony Orchestra and Sir Simon Rattle showed a different side to the piece – or rather sides, because this was a performance lit from within by a remarkably full realisation of its place in Read more ...
Jessica Duchen
I can’t deny that it’s great to be able to experience a recital by Benjamin Grosvenor live from the Barbican despite lockdown, streamed into your own home. The filming of this performance on Saturday night was superb, clear and well paced; we could see his hands up close, from a good variety of angles, and they are well worth seeing; and the coloured lighting was coordinated nicely with the music, for instance sea-turquoise for Ravel’s “Ondine”. Nonetheless, a certain heartbreak remains upon seeing the pianist adrift on a small platform constructed in the middle of the empty stalls, like a Read more ...
theartsdesk
Unhappy as it is to be ending the year with museums and galleries closed, 2020 has had its triumphs, and there is plenty to look forward to in 2021. Two much anticipated exhibitions at the National Gallery were delayed and subject to closures and restrictions, but these seem relatively trivial inconveniences in the long lives of Titian’s "poesie", reunited after four centuries, or the paintings of Artemisia Gentileschi, brought together for the gallery’s first major exhibition dedicated to a female artist. These works of art, so fragile and yet so long-lived, helped to maintain a long view Read more ...
Maxine Kwok
2020: a year that at some point felt like the end of live performance for the world of the performing arts, certainly for the foreseeable future. Artists spent months without any form of collaboration, leading to a serious lack of motivation due to the decimation of performance opportunities. Coupled with the stressful change in their financial circumstances a huge percentage of people with professions in the performing arts found themselves completely rudderless.I myself wandered aimlessly around the Barbican Estate, gazing longingly at the Barbican Centre and feeling empty without the daily Read more ...
peter.quinn
When Aaron Copland wrote his most beloved work, Appalachian Spring, in 1943/44, he gave it the unfussy working title of “Ballet for Martha” – Martha being the choreographer Martha Graham, for whom he’d written the score. It was only shortly before the premiere, long after the ink was dry on the score, that Graham appended the more alluring title, excerpted from Hart Crane’s poem "The Dance", by which the work is now known. At a birthday concert held in his honour at the Library of Congress in 1981, the composer noted with amusement how, due to the oft-repeated scenario of people telling him Read more ...
David Nice
“Live music is back,” runs the Barbican's latest slogan, so treasure it and get out there while you can. Thursday evening in London offered an embarrassment of riches. I chose the City of London Sinfonia live in Southwark Cathedral over the Kanneh-Masons on the other side of the Thames in the Barbican only because I knew I could catch up with the family live on screen later. My colleague Jessica Duchen was one of the lucky few in the Royal Festival Hall for violinist Tasmin Little’s farewell recital.You could also have taken your pick, if you could get a ticket, between two pianists – Read more ...
Bernard Hughes
If “things” hadn’t intervened, September would have seen the Divine Comedy play a five night residency at the Barbican, playing their entire back catalogue, two albums a night, to mark 30 years since the band was started. Instead we got just one night – which Neil Hannon described as “the first night of the tour, and the last night of the tour” in front of a well spaced out live audience and a remote streaming audience (which included me). In a short, 13 song set, we had a canter through all the favourites which would remind anyone who needed reminding that the Divine Comedy are a jewel in Read more ...
Jenny Gilbert
It must be tough being Michael Clark, subject of one the largest retrospectives ever dedicated to a choreographer still living. Post-punk’s poster boy is that curious thing, a creative figurehead who defined a very particular anti-establishment strand in Britain’s recent history but who is virtually unknown to today’s under-40s. Michael who? was the common reponse to my own admittedly fairly narrow survey. But Clark deserves a place in the pantheon of 20th-century movers and shakers for the same reason as, say, Andy Warhol or Jean Cocteau. Like them, he operated at the intersection of many Read more ...
Sebastian Scotney
This concert by Sir Bryn Terfel and the Britten Sinfonia, the very first concert given at the Barbican in front of an audience since 15 March, was surely in need of some stronger explanation than that offered by the blurb for the evening, namely “comfort and familiarity” and a “remedial tonic of an evening.”There was, and more than one. First there was a biographical story: as the Welsh singer explained, the first and second elements of the three-part programme had both a personal and a local significance for him. The second work, Gerald Finzi’s cycle of Shakespeare songs Let us Garlands Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
Larkin Poe are an American blues-rock band fronted by the Lovell sisters, Rebecca and Megan, both mainstays of the US Americana scene since their teens, at the start of this century. Best known in Europe for their fired-up gigs and festival appearances, their fifth album starts off accessibly yet the immediate thought is that it’s overly derivative. Once it settles into its stride, however, the listener forgets all that, as the band offer up a plethora of solid songs in various riffin' southern styles.The immediate reference point for this writer is Deap Vally, the female Californian duo who Read more ...
David Nice
He may no longer be the Berlin Philharmoniker's Chief Conductor, but by a combination of serendipity and foresight on the orchestra's part, Simon Rattle's last concert in Berlin for the foreseeable future was filmed without an audience and led the way for other, smaller-scale ventures before gatherings of any sort beyond chamber music with players at a distance became an impossibility. The current stopgap is the kind "his" orchestra now, the London Symphony Orchestra, is offering: past films on the nights when a concert would have taken place.The latest, in place of what we would have Read more ...