Barbican
David Nice
Not to be overshadowed by the adrenalin charges of the Budapest Festival Orchestra the previous evening, the BBC Symphony Orchestra and its Principal Guest Conductor Dalia Stasevska gave a supercharged triple whammy of masterpieces. They even had a pianist to match the Budapesters’ Igor Levit, Jean-Efflam Bavouzet. He seemed as delighted with Stasevska and the players as they were with him; the post-performance embraces spoke volumes about communicative kindred spirits.Was it worth assembling a full BBC Symphony Chorus and two soloists as well as large orchestra for the first 18 minutes? Read more ...
Boyd Tonkin
Exactly half a century ago, Semyon Bychkov fled the USSR for the United States as he sought to swap tyranny for liberty. Last night, in a world that feels utterly different yet even more terrifying, the great conductor turned the stellar talents of his Czech Philharmonic Orchestra to the music of Dmitri Shostakovich: both a victim, and a troubled celebrant, of the searing Soviet history he endured. At the Barbican (a date on the Czechs’ current European tour), we inevitably felt the weight of the past that conductor and orchestra carry, in a programme that paired Shostakovich’s First Read more ...
David Nice
Let’s call it Jane Austen fit for the West End, but with opera singers. The fact that it also serves as a fun ensemble piece for students is also very much in favour of Jonathan Dove’s Mansfield Park, with a neatly telescoped and often witty libretto by Alasdair Middleton. Like his latest work, Uprising, a community opera for Glyndebourne staged at the weekend, it presses all the right buttons for the young, while staying within safe and mostly derivative boundaries.Act One is delicious: think "A Weekend in the Country" from Sondheim's A Little Night Music, brio set up with sung chapter Read more ...
Rachel Halliburton
At the age of 83, Martha Argerich contains more personality in her little finger than many people do in their entire bodies.Her vigorous, technically dazzling delivery of Beethoven’s Second Piano Concerto began before she even touched the piano. As the orchestra played the opening passage she wasn’t just swaying in time to the music, she was hunching forward for the diminuendos and mouthing “ba-dum ba-dum ba-dum” along to the dotted rhythms. She couldn’t wait to be part of the performance, and right from the crisp ornamentation of her first entry she was its life and soul.Argerich has Read more ...
Sarah Kent
In 2013 the American artist, Noah Davis used a legacy left him by his father to create a museum of contemporary art in Arlington Heights, an area of Los Angeles populated largely by Blacks and Latinos. But his Underground Museum faced a problem; it didn’t have any art to put on display and none of the institutions approached by Davis would loan him their precious holdings.The solution? Davis set about creating clones of famous artworks that feature mass produced items. Collectively titled Imitation of Wealth (pictured below) they now occupy a gallery in his Barbican retrospective. Marcel Read more ...
David Nice
For all its passing British sea shanties and folksongs, Vaughan Williams’ A Sea Symphony does Walt Whitman’s determinedly global-oriented poetry full justice. That “pennant universal” was reflected in two superlative soloists from South Africa and the USA, our national treasure of an Anglo-Italian conductor, an Argentinian chorus director and a raft of international names in chorus and orchestra who just happen to be UK citizens.Only one aspect wasn’t big enough for this epic journey – the Barbican Hall itself. A Sea Symphony needs space above and around it: that you get in spades at the Read more ...
David Nice
Perhaps all great music counterpoints and comments on the times, but Antonio Pappano and the London Symphony Orchestra have been searingly congruent. Before he took up his post as Chief Conductor, there were the extinction whispers of Vaughan Williams’ Sixth Symphony the night before lockdown and the fury of VW’s Fourth on the eve of Boris Johnson’s election. Now the aggressive dynamism of Walton’s First raised us out of that sinking feeling as the USA worsens by the day.George Walker’s Sinfonia No. 5. “Visions” (the composer pictured below by Frank Schramm), could have been charged, too, Read more ...
David Nice
At the end of an exhausting week in which Holocaust Memorial Day struck a more urgent note than ever as fascism started tearing through the USA, parts of this concert were bound to hit hard. That they did so to the power of 100 was thanks to the extraordinary impact of Jakub Hrůša, now recognised as one of the greats by British audiences as he waits to take up the full-time reins at the Royal Opera. The BBC Symphony Orchestra burned for him in fullest focus.Shostakovich’s Eleventh is one of his symphonies which require special pleading (which is much better than bad, the only adjective to Read more ...
Rachel Halliburton
Gustavo Dudamel and the Simón Bolívar Symphony Orchestra of Venezuela took the Barbican by storm last night with a thrilling account of Mahler’s Third Symphony, his great exploration of the cosmic order, ascending from raw paganism to sublime transcendence. It's technically the longest symphony ever composed, and here it swept the audience through an epic journey that tilted between passages of gossamer-like intimacy and outbursts of apocalyptic rage.The orchestra is renowned for its full-blooded performances, yet yesterday evening it felt that the stakes were higher than usual for the Read more ...
Boyd Tonkin
When does a concert become a ceremony? You generally visit the Barbican for art rather than ritual. Yet, during the Academy of Ancient Music’s performance last night, the bulk of a packed house still stood up for the “Hallelujah” that closes the second part of Handel’s Messiah.This charming, or plain odd, British folk-tradition supposedly derives from George II having done the same in 1743 – although there’s no evidence that the monarch ever rose to the occasion. In any case, it indicates that many of those who rightly love Messiah still treat it as much more than an especially fine Baroque Read more ...
alexandra.coghlan
There are no battlement leaps or murderous vows, no pistols or daggers, not so much as a slight cough disturbs the serene plot of La rondine – the Puccini opera once labelled a “poor man’s Traviata”.And yet it’s all the better for it. This is a voluptuous femme fatale of a score dressed up in a shy smile and a coy over-the-shoulder glance of a plot: pure musical emotion in search of a dramatic outlet. No wonder Merchant and Ivory found the soundtrack for A Room With A View’s unspoken yearnings and repressed passions in its “Chi il bel sogno di Doretta”.If repression is in Antonio Pappano’s Read more ...
Rachel Halliburton
Hermia is a headbutting punk with a tartan fetish, Oberon looks like Adam Ant and Lysander appears to have stumbled out of a Madness video. Yet Eleanor Rhode’s exuberant A Midsummer Night’s Dream – which has transferred from a triumphant run at Stratford-Upon-Avon – is no straightforward Eighties tribute, but a psychedelic mashup that’s as ravishing as it’s gritty.Lucy Osborne’s versatile design whisks us from the sinister grandeur of the opening – in which a sun resembling a military flag hangs over the stage to remind us that Theseus has wooed Hippolyta by force – to the hallucinogenic Read more ...