Barbican
edward.seckerson
Sir Adrian Boult laid the foundations for its revival, more recently Sir Mark Elder found astonishing illumination within it, and now a third knight of the realm - Sir Andrew Davis (the latest recipient of the Elgar Medal) - chivalrously stamps his authority on it and brings it in from the cold.Elgar’s The Apostles is both typical and startlingly untypical of the composer. So much about its retelling of the gospels is spare and concentrated, so much is understated with that peculiarly English air of dispassion that until you grow accepting of its stately pace you crave the urgency and Read more ...
Matthew Wright
In the 1960s and early 70s drummer Jack DeJohnette, now 71, was learning his craft with nearly everyone who was anyone, including Coltrane, Monk, Keith Jarrett and Miles Davis. Last night at the Barbican, he was the presiding spirit (if not, technically, leader) in a new multi-generational “supergroup”, the Spring Quartet, alongside Blue Note’s star saxophonist Joe Lovano (61), and two thirtysomethings, pianist Leo Genovese, and the winner of the 2011 best new artist Grammy Esperanza Spalding. It was like watching spring in slow motion: the new shoots are vigorous, but there’s still plenty of Read more ...
David Nice
Last year a DVD appeared featuring the 15 winning performances from the start of the BBC Cardiff Singer of the World Competition up to 2011. I watched them all, skimming if any seemed a notch below par but staying with most. You could see the star quality and the promise in many who have since become great artists, including Karita Mattila, Anja Harteros and Ekaterina Shcherbachenko. But only two seemed like the fully finished article from the start: Siberian baritone Dmitri Hvorostovsky in 1989 – the year Bryn Terfel won the Lieder prize – and American soprano Nicole Cabell in 2005, the Read more ...
Sebastian Scotney
Can there be a conductor with a clearer and more affirming beat than Mariss Jansons with the Concertgebouw Orchestra when they're at their best? The listener can just marvel at his capacity to work in partnership with this fine orchestra, to underline and reinforce everything they do, to enable them to land cleanly, decisively and unanimously, to introduce new ideas with care, precision and beauty, to treat the end of phrases with respect, love and punctiliousnes.Jansons can make the Concertgebouw sound in every respect and in every department a marvellous orchestra, even in a hall like the Read more ...
Hanna Weibye
Taken together, the memorial accoutrements of the First World War are probably this country's most highly developed, and widely experienced, discourse of public history. Through two-minute silences, poppies, public monuments, and near-univeral school exposure we still, four generations later, honour in the texture of our national public life the desperate need of the war generation not to forget the horror they had been through. Though subsequent conflicts have been included in the commemoration – Armistice Day becoming Remembrance Day – it is still the war called Great that shaped it: the Read more ...
stephen.walsh
The Tchaikovsky de nos jours, is Theodore Gumbril’s dismissal of Skryabin in Aldous Huxley’s Twenties novel Antic Hay. For some reason, Alexander Skryabin has suffered more than most from snap judgements of this kind. He has been the woolly theosophist, the vacuous, over-inflated mystifier, the effete, self-indulgent decorative – everything except the refined, disciplined creative genius. It’s high time these images were consigned to the rubbish dump of history, along with the dull-witted Bach, the mad Beethoven, and for that matter the slushy Tchaikovsky. Skryabin was a superior artist whose Read more ...
David Nice
We’ve now learned from the films of Paolo Sorrentino and honorary Roman Ferzan Ozpetek what great and nuanced ensemble acting the Italians can produce. Even so, the towering star of the current scene is the chameleonic Toni Servillo, already hailed as seemingly impassive capo di tutti capi Andreotti in Il Divo and as the (Oscar-winning) regretful playboy Jep Gambardella in the stupendous La grande bellezza (The Great Beauty).Servillo is, in fact, a stage animal of longer standing with feet firmly planted on thespian ground as actor/director, a Neapolitan to the core and as such the natural Read more ...
David Nice
Depth, height, breadth, a sense of the new and strange in three brilliantly-programmed works spanning just over a century: all these and a clarity in impassioned execution told us why the BBC Symphony Orchestra was inspired in choosing Finn Sakari Oramo as its principal conductor. Their anniversary journey through Nielsen’s symphonies next Barbican season – itself a heady mix announced amid the palms of the singular conservatory before a vintage assembly of performances around the Centre – is more fascinating in prospect, for me at any rate, than the promised visits of the New York and Berlin Read more ...
Matthew Wright
Revelling in the acoustic precision of the recently opened Milton Court concert hall last night, Norwegian pianist Tord Gustavsen showed once more why his quartet’s combination of tersely lyrical melodies and syncopated rhythms is so appealing. For his new album, some of which was played here, his typically European, restrained sound was, to a greater extent than previously, augmented by some distinctly funky passages, which were drawn out with immense skill and sensitivity from what had gone before. Several pieces shared both an extraordinary variety of style, and a seamlessly smooth Read more ...
Peter Culshaw
On paper this sounded promising: a gothicky song-cycle of historical London and the dark, seamy side of the city, performed a stone’s throw from where they do Jack the Ripper tours. Lead performers were Marc Almond, whose distinctive voice we have loved for 30 years, ever since his pervy soul debut with Soft Cell, and John Harle, a more than useful jazzy classicist who is often original and known for his TV theme tunes. Thown in the mix was some Iain Sinclair psycho-geography. An intriguing combination with a positively reviewed album The Tyburn Tree, of which this show was a presentation. Read more ...
Matthew Wright
The Barbican brought two of the great originals of contemporary music together last night. Ralph Towner and Egberto Gismonti are temperamentally very different, but complement one another wonderfully, in an inspired piece of programming. Both are stylistically polyglot, straddling contemporary classical technique as well as jazz and, in Gismonti’s case especially, a range of folk idioms. Like two paths taking different routes up a mountain, they have both reached peaks of remarkable musical achievement, but taken different routes, and offered different views along the way. Read more ...
Hanna Weibye
Well! Just when you think you’ve constructed a nice tripartite schema for dance styles based on their relationship with the ground, along comes a company which tears up that rule book entirely.Last week I theorized that contemporary dance goes down to the ground, ballet aims up off it, and Tanztheater Wuppertal walks, magnificently, on it. Then I saw Circa, an Australian contemporary circus ensemble, who on last night’s evidence can apparently dispense with the ground altogether and just fly through the air instead.Ok, I exaggerate. But not all that much: Circa’s performers Read more ...