Barbican
David Nice
It’s hard to know which aspect of this adventure to praise the most. Perhaps the fact that of the four recent works originally programmed, the two freshest were by young beneficiaries of the LSO Panufnik Composers Scheme. There was also the pleasure orchestral members took in their colleagues’ playing, not just Rebecca Gilliver’s as soloist. The culminating glory was their response to François-Xavier Roth’s mastery in Bartók’s Concerto for Orchestra.More by accident than design, the living composers were bracketed by two great Hungarians. Admirably, Roth and the orchestra adapted to the sad Read more ...
Bernard Hughes
It is Passion season, and Bach’s St John and St Matthew – as well as his less well-known Easter Oratorio – have been well covered on theartsdesk in the last few weeks. Whether with large choir, small choir, or one to a part with no separate chorus, there have been plenty of great performances to be heard this year. The Academy of Ancient Music’s St Matthew Passion at the Barbican yesterday was an example of the latter and was up there with the best, if not perhaps benefiting from the acoustic of Edinburgh’s Queen’s Hall, as reported on by Simon Thompson.The Barbican, both in its size and Read more ...
Liz Thomson
We’ve come a long way since 1971, when the audience at Madison Square Garden for the Concert for Bangladesh applauded when Ravi Shankar tuned up. Western audiences were first exposed to the sitar in 1965 when George Harrison played one on Rubber Soul, the earliest instance of the instrument being used in rock music. Soon it was all over the place, most often in the form of the Danelectro electric sitar, with its “buzz” bridge design offering an imitation of the sitar’s distinctive sound on an instrument easily playable by guitarists: unlike George Harrison, few took the time to master the Read more ...
Rachel Halliburton
It began with the tolling of a lone bell and ended in a transcendent blaze of golden light. The UK premiere of James MacMillan’s Fiat Lux – first performed in Los Angeles in 2023 to mark the dedication of the dazzling crystalline Christ Cathedral, formerly a televangelist backdrop, as a Catholic church – was as exhilarating as it was meditative, an iridescent exploration of spirituality and sound.James MacMillan – who during the concert was awarded with an Ivors Academy Fellowship to mark his status as one of our most successful living composers – conducted the BBC Symphony Orchestra himself Read more ...
David Nice
How lucky those of us were who grew up musically with the young Simon Rattle’s highly original programming in the 1980s. He’s still doing it at a time when diminishing resources can dictate more careful repertoire, and last night’s Americana proved spectacularly original. Four of the five works gave a different perspective on the decade and a half in which Shostakovich’s very different Fourth Symphony, LSO triumph of the earlier part of the week, failed to reach public performance.Did the sequence work? Not entirely. Bookending a John Adams premiere, an unfamiliar expansion of Gershwin’s Read more ...
Ed Vulliamy
The LSO’s apéritif hour “Half-Six Fixes” have an informality that usually works and sometimes doesn’t. But the first of this two-night run of Dmitri Shostakovich’s monstrous and terrifying Fourth Symphony was unforgettable. Panels on the auditorium walls greeted the audience with a portrait of the composer and his famous note: “The authorities tried everything they knew to get me to repent… But I refused. Instead of repenting, I wrote my Fourth Symphony”.When Simon Rattle took to the podium he explained, for anyone who did not already know, the story behind them: pocket Shostakovich in 20 Read more ...
Bernard Hughes
This was a muesli programme: nutty, crunchy, just sweet enough, its success lying in the balance of the various ingredients. At times, such was the explosiveness of the playing, it felt like popping candy had been added to the muesli, but in a good way. The fireworks came in the brilliant John Adams finale, but also from the young Russian pianist Alexander Malofeev, whose playing blazed in the first half.Prokofiev’s Third Piano Concerto, written for the composer himself to play and begun when he was little older than Malofeev is now, is certainly young man’s music. Malofeev responded to its Read more ...
Florence Hallett
Judy Chicago created Birth Project in the 1980s, recognising with typical perspicacity that the favouring of “the paint strokes of the great male painters” over “the incredible array of needle techniques that women have used for centuries” has implications far beyond the precedence of one art form over another. She saw that a gendered hierarchy of art forms had contributed to the erasure of female experience, and pointed to the “iconographic void” where images of childbirth in western art might be.Appearing early on in the show, Birth Tear/Tear, 1982, is an extraordinary evocation of the Read more ...
David Nice
That it would be a vividly operatic kind of oratorio performance was never in doubt. Mendelssohn, who said he wanted to create “a real world, such as you find in every chapter of the Old Testament,” instigates high drama with Elijah’s brass-backed opening statement. Pappano then let the orchestral and vocal narrative fly like an arrow, supported to the hilt by all involved, not least four great singers with whom he’d achieved several major successes at the Royal Opera.The only real problem with the evening was the work itself. You feel Mendelssohn was made for the sweet and the sorrowful, yet Read more ...
David Nice
An inexhaustible masterpiece shows different facets with each new interpretation. I’d thought of Jenůfa, Janáček's searing tale of Moravian village life based on a great play by a pioneering woman (Gabriela Preissová), as an open razor rushing through the world, cutting left and right. Simon Rattle presented instead an opulent bouquet, one slowly purged of the poisonous blooms within it.Last year’s concert performance of Káťa Kabanová offered a more obvious candidate for luminous lyricism. Jenůfa, an earlier work not without problems, rather than great originalities, of orchestration, needed Read more ...
David Nice
It could have been a winner: a charismatic star soprano of great emotional and interpretative intelligence, a top pianist given a little space to shine on his own, a programme that looked good on paper, of distinguished German/Austro-German women composers in the first half, French dark versus light in the second. But Milton Court is an unwelcoming venue, like being inside a dark-wood coffin, and the singer seemed uneasy between numbers to begin with.The voice itself, that bright but far from light soprano, had settled by the time we reached three songs by Clara Schumann; the first group, by Read more ...
India Lewis
Coming at the end of a long year’s gigging, This Is The Kit’s performance at the Barbican on Saturday night was an excellent demonstration of the whole band’s familial, compelling musicianship.Support came from The Raincoats’ Gina Birch (and friends), whose politely raucous set was backgrounded by films that she had made during her art school days – the first of which, she told us, is featured in Women in Revolt!, currently on show at Tate Britain (a still from it is actually the poster for the show). Gina and her two bandmates played a rousing collection of songs, pulling no punches and with Read more ...