Barbican
David Nice
Back at the Barbican for a new season after a Far Eastern tour, the BBC Symphony Orchestra returned to pull off a characteristic stunt, a generous four-work programme featuring at least one piece surely no-one in the audience woud have heard live before. This time, the first quarter belonged exclusively to the unaccompanied BBC Singers in one of the most demanding sets of the choral repertoire. After which the seemingly humble but dogged and vivacious Marc Minkowski helped create orchestral magic of three very different kinds, defining French composers’ infinite capacity for play.Serious Read more ...
edward.seckerson
For the Leipzig Gewandhaus Orchestra’s second residency at the Barbican Centre Riccardo Chailly pulled focus on an entirely new sounding Brahms. Gone were all those bad performance practices, bad habits, from the early 20th century, gone was the lingering romanticism, the willful soupiness, and in with a vengeance came a classical rigour, a lean and hungry vitality. Like so much of what we have come to expect of Chailly the first of this four concert series with its attendant side events brought a total re-evaluation of the composer: no longer the conservative romantic, the polar opposite of Read more ...
David Nice
Milton Court’s new concert hall is a mighty small space, but the BBC Singers under their chief conductor David Hill were determined to launch their residency there with a musical epic of world events from Genesis to the post-nuclear era. And they carried it off triumphantly, if with some ear-singeing resonances, in American works from the last 66 years ringing with bright tonalities. The real surprise was to find Nevadan choral guru Eric Whitacre reaching for the stars as confidently, if not as consistently, as Steve Reich in his 1984 masterpiece The Desert Music.Copland did well by this Read more ...
David Nice
Night life in the Square Mile, at least from the perspective of my evening routes around the Barbican, is dominated by booze and sportiness. The way to last Thursday’s concert was blocked by a Bloomberg relay marathon, and cycling through the tunnel towards Milton Court yesterday evening, I encountered the bizarre spectacle of carnival-style trucks pedalled by a dozen drinkers apiece, sitting at a central "bar" and already well oiled. City money, though, still supports culture, and never more impressively than in underpinning Milton Court's new collection of performance and teaching spaces Read more ...
David Nice
Rumour machines have been thrumming to the tune of “Rattle as next LSO Principal Conductor”. Sir Simon would, it’s true, be as good for generating publicity as the current incumbent, the ever more alarming Valery Gergiev. But if the orchestra wanted to do something fresh and daring, it would be better advised to take the plunge with Robin Ticciati, a disarming mix of youth - he’s still only 30 - and mastery; his romantic rubato, the freedom with the phrases, already strikes me as more convincing than Rattle’s has ever been, as last night's Dvořák testified.If that more interesting Read more ...
Jasper Rees
This season opener was about closure too. The London Symphony Orchestra was back at the office last night, but this fresh stretch of concerts opened with an opera it has been performing while also acquiring a suntan in Aix-en-Provence. A new cast of singers replaced gaudy costumes and facepaint with elegant evening garb, and semi-acted their roles on the thin strip of forestage not occupied by the massed ranks of the orchestra.The concept of the concert performance has never had more enthusiastic support than at the recent run of seven Wagner operas, amounting to a gazillion hours without Read more ...
Russ Coffey
Last night the “freaky” Devendra Banhart didn’t make an appearance. No songs were performed cross-legged, nor were there any wig-outs. For the majority of the evening the 32-year-old American-Venezuelan hippy was, by his standards, practically understated. In keeping with his new album, Mala, he chose to emphasise songwriting over personality. For those of us who were beginning to lose faith in him, it all came as something of a relief.At the beginning of Banhart’s psychedelic-folk career, the tall singer’s exotic approach led many to consider him a wunderkind. His imagination was wild and Read more ...
alexandra.coghlan
What rare luxury. A three-concert series from the London Symphony Orchestra and their Principal Guest Conductor Michael Tilson Thomas is lure enough, but add three collaborations with Yo-Yo Ma as soloist and you have to rope off a special area in the Barbican for the returns queue. Rarer still – it would be worth every moment of the wait.The concert-triptych has been a meditation on musical friendships and relationships, with long-time colleagues Ma and Tilson Thomas paying homage to the complex network of emotions and influences that existed between Britten, Copland and Shostakovich, three Read more ...
alexandra.coghlan
Although originally commissioned by the Royal Opera House, Benjamin Britten’s opera Owen Wingrave was always intended to be an opera-for-television. Perhaps it’s this unusual pedigree that has scared off potential performances of this little-seen work, perhaps it’s the piece’s awkward drama and barely digested polemic. Either way it’s a shame. This late score is full of Brittenish melodic fragments and orchestral colours, and if the opera house wouldn’t exactly be the poorer for its absence the concert hall certainly would.Why the inherently naturalistic medium of television should have Read more ...
David Nice
There are Handel operas where you wait impatiently for the handful of truly original set-pieces to light up the action, hoping the singers are equal to their challenges. One such is surely Siroe, Re di Persia, bravely staged at the Göttingen Handel Festival the other week. Others like Imeneo sparkle with genius and personality in virtually every number, musically if not dramatically the equal of a Shakespeare late romance.It’s a pleasure to sit through a reasonably animated concert performance like this, cast regardless, when the strings of an unshowy orchestra dart like little cupids around Read more ...
Ismene Brown
For the Royal Ballet's exquisite star Alina Cojocaru her dream is performing some of the most physically demanding movements ever devised for a human being - for a paralysed 52-year-old man in Romania, the dream is to go to the park and look at the sky. Cojocaru's dream is realisable; Marius's is not. Romania is not a country where you would want to be ill, says the ballerina of her native land.This Sunday Cojocaru returns some of the value of her talent and position in the world to her homeland by hosting a ballet gala at Sadler's Wells Theatre to raise money for the Romanian Hospices of Read more ...
Kimon Daltas
The Barbican Hall’s house lights faded to black, with just the soft glow of music stand lamps on stage as the Britten Sinfonia filed on and eased into the Adagietto from Mahler’s Fifth Symphony. Directed from leader’s desk by Jacqueline Shave, the orchestra gave an exquisite account of the piece, the chamber aesthetic and necessary communication between players somehow helping to draw the audience in. It was certainly a rewarding alternative to the lusher – and slushier – version one would hear from a full symphony orchestra’s worth of strings.It was a nice theatrical touch to begin the Read more ...