Barbican
Roderic Dunnett
Valery Gergiev’s exploration of the music of Karol Szymanowski is one of the most vitalising series mounted at the Barbican in recent years - to compare, say, with Sir Colin Davis’s Sibelius and Berlioz, Michael Tilson Thomas’s tributes to Leonard Bernstein, or Gergiev’s own Shostakovich and (increasingly) Prokofiev.The first point, and Gergiev himself is in no doubt about this, is that Szymanowski belongs right up there with the best of them. An uncredited introductory note (the others, pithy and perceptive, are by Polish-Russian specialist Adrian Thomas) rightly points out that Szymanowski Read more ...
Roderic Dunnett
Valery Gergiev is a human dynamo. Even before embarking on the latest tranche of his (slightly curious) pairing of Szymanowski and Brahms with the London Symphony Orchestra, of which he has been principal conductor since 2007, at the Barbican, the man who is arguably not just a musical but a socio-political force in his native country and music director of the most famous opera and ballet company in the world was down that morning at the Russian Embassy in London, promoting his plans for a whole new complex (Mariinsky 2), which from May next year will dramatically enhance the prospects of an Read more ...
Peter Culshaw
Philip Glass is sufficiently famous that his 75th Birthday celebrations have been going on all year (he was actually 75 in January) and the year saw two of the absolute highlights of his career presented at the Barbican. His first opera Einstein On The Beach and last night, the soundtrack to his first film score Koyaanisqatsi, performed alongside the film itself, with Glass on keyboards. More of his “greatest hits” will be performed at the Union Chapel in Islington tonight.There will be those who remain implacably opposed to what they see as his facile repetitive argeggios and are inclined to Read more ...
alexandra.coghlan
If you’ve ever wondered what a bad day at the office looked like for Handel then look no further than Belshazzar – an oratorio that positively demands heavenly intervention and possibly a bit of smiting. With a first act that worried even the composer with its length, a confused magpie plot and a libretto whose worst excrescences outdo even those of Congreve’s Semele, it’s one of those neglected works that gain little by being dragged out into the light, even by such distinguished champions as William Christie and Les Arts Florissants.Which is a shame, because it’s a rare delight these days Read more ...
alexandra.coghlan
Say what you like about America, but it certainly knows how to turn out an opera diva. While the Russians and even Italians can be chilly and untouchable in their splendour, there’s a cultivated ease with the likes of Renée Fleming and Joyce DiDonato that allows a song recital to be both a relaxed conversation with an old friend and a piece of highly crafted technical showmanship. It’s artifice and artistry of the highest order – not just making it all look easy, but showing us just enough mechanics to prove that it definitely isn’t.The Barbican Hall isn’t a natural venue for a song recital, Read more ...
David Nice
Her Majesty was making a rare concert-hall appearance to present the Queen’s Medal for Music, and any little Englanders in the audience might have been tempted to link royalty to Elgar’s Enigma Variations. But conductor Robin Ticciati, with a generosity and wisdom beyond his 29 years, raised this orchestral masterpiece to the universal level it deserves. Elgar’s "friends pictured within" trod air and revealed every aspect of their often shy, beautiful souls.It should come as no surprise that the score transcends labels of nationality, provinciality even. After all, what is "Nimrod" but the Read more ...
David Nice
Now the BBC Symphony Orchestra’s second Conductor Laureate, Jiří Bělohlávek was always going to deserve a hero’s welcome for taking his players to the finishing line of their six-year cycle through Mahler’s symphonies. As more superficially brilliant Mahler series like Gergiev’s, squeezed into a single anniversary season, seem a distant memory, many of Bělohlávek’s slow burn, deep vein interpretations live on in the mind and soul. Last night’s Second Symphony, following an equally well prepared Schumann Piano Concerto with the scrupulous Francesco Piemontesi, shared many of those qualities. Read more ...
Kimon Daltas
Leonidas Kavakos was originally meant to be premiering a concerto by Argentinian composer Oswaldo Golijov, which had also been scheduled for Berlin in 2011 and subsequently for Los Angeles in May this year. The composer missed both those deadlines and the work apparently remains uncompleted – it was replaced on the programme by the Berg concerto.This was the first concert in Kavakos’ residency with the LSO under the UBS Soundscapes Artist Portrait banner, a series which also see him perform concertos by Sibelius and Szymanowski. The Greek violinist, shoulder-length hair pushed behind his ears Read more ...
David Nice
There are always risks involved in the uncompromising side of the BBC Symphony Orchestra’s family-friendly concerts. Succulent slices of fox-meat in the form of a suite from Janáček’s The Cunning Little Vixen gave the kids a nourishing start, and Rimsky-Korsakov’s Scheherazade was always going to seduce them with her effervescent narrative, especially given Czech conductor Jakub Hrůša’s youthful instincts to paint big, bold pictures. But would they sit still through the thrashes and mystic meditations of the latest BBC commission, composer-pianist Rolf Hind’s The Tiniest House of Time?Fellow Read more ...
Ismene Brown
Why is music? A child’s question, a great question. One answered by Evgeny Kissin’s piano recital at London’s Barbican Centre last night, where you might want to engage analysis and come up later with answers but what happened was that you left the concert hall feeling more alive, emotions retooled, spirit lightened, range widened. Music is because. Why else would Beethoven compose 32 piano sonatas? What possible purpose of Haydn to write 62 of them? Because.Kissin is 41, which means he has left his child prodigy reputation far behind him and is now maybe midway through his career. I haven’t Read more ...
Peter Culshaw
The moody lights and the smoke make it look like Melody Gardot is emerging from the swamp, probably somewhere near New Orleans, as she begins her set singing a capella. Her walking stick and shades (the result of a bad accident in 2003) only add to the initial feeling that she is the spiritual heir, if not the actual misbegotten daughter of a figure like Dr John, the Night Tripper. As an ex-fashion student, she oozes style, no bad thing in a jazz world that often equates scruffiness with authenticity.With a first rate band joining her on stage, directed by drummer Chuck Staab and Read more ...
judith.flanders
The famous count could not have a more theatrical pedigree if he tried. The great actor-manager Henry Irving – tall, preternaturally thin, with a fixed glare (due, apparently, to extreme myopia) and a grand manner which gave way, said Bernard Shaw, to "glimpses of a latent bestial dangerousness" – was, said everyone at the time, the obvious source of the Transylvanian Undead aristo as he was created on the page in Dracula by Irving’s business-manager Bram Stoker.TR Warszawa, too, has a theatrical pedigree. In London the company appeared two years ago to acclaim in Sarah Kane’s 4.48 Psychosis Read more ...