Barbican
Peter Culshaw
You may be feeling Titanic fatigue by now, the last straw being the so-so Julian Fellowes TV romp which heads, as Adam Sweeting points out elsewhere, “an epidemic of TV programmes” this week. Rather than seeing any of them, or the Cameron film epic, or even Roy Wood Baker’s 1958 melodrama A Night to Remember, can I quietly recommend the evocative and moving The Sinking of the Titanic by Gavin Bryars, which will be performed at Birmingham Town Hall on (pause for doom-laden chord) Friday the 13th and at the Barbican on the 15th, the exact centenary date.Quietly recommending seems to be the Read more ...
Marcus O'Dair and Igor Toronyi-Lalic
Sufjan Stevens is a singer-songwriter of startling scope, one minute releasing a record dedicated to the state of Illinois, the next a five-disc Christmas box set or an album for the animals of the Chinese Zodiac. Bryce Dessner is the guitarist in indie rock act The National, but also plays semi-improvised avant-folk with Clogs and works with leading classical ensembles like Kronos Quartet and Bang On A Can.Composer Nico Muhly counts among his collaborators both symphony orchestras and the likes of Bjork, Bonnie "Prince" Billy and Antony and the Johnsons. He’s written soundtracks and operas Read more ...
geoff brown
After conducting two performances of Parsifal since Saturday and one of Mahler’s Eighth Symphony, most human beings would be spending a day curled up at home. But Valery Gergiev doesn’t know what carpet slippers look like. Besides, he’s currently on tour in Britain with his Mariinsky Opera forces, and he’s conducting nothing but blockbusters. Last night, Verdi’s Requiem in London. On Good Friday, it’s the epic Parsifal again, in Birmingham. The tour finished, he’ll be back in St Petersburg by Sunday, launching the Mariinsky’s third International Piano Festival. Brisk rhythms melted into Read more ...
Peter Culshaw
The dazzling Cuban pianist Roberto Fonseca delighted a packed Barbican last night – but part of the fun was seeing him negotiate the balance between more soulful, minimal playing and sheer technically brilliant extravagance. Is he more an heir to Chucho Valdez, the consummate sophisticated Havana Jazzer, or to Ruben Gonzalez, the more lyrical pianist of the Buena Vista Social Club, into whose shoes he had the tricky task of stepping for their live tours? The set lifted off with the driving beat of the self-penned “80s”, also the opening track of his new album Yo. It enabled the Read more ...
geoff brown
Originally, this concert was to open with that mercurial wonder Martha Argerich playing an unspecified piano concerto. Then its first item became Martha Argerich not playing anything, for the good lady, almost as rare a visitor to Britain as the Man in the Moon, did what she’s famous for doing. She cancelled. Acting with award-winning panache, the Barbican then found a substitute artist who’s recently become even rarer, the violinist Maxim Vengerov. Known for his golden tone, charisma and fire, Vengerov last performed in Britain with his violin in 2007: the year of his serious shoulder Read more ...
igor.toronyilalic
I don't much like aspirational music-making. I like my classical classical and my pop pop. Give me Boulez over Bernstein, Britney over Radiohead, any day. Having said that, I'd heard a piece by Jonny Greenwood at Reverb last month that had gone some way to winning me over. For a brief moment, Greenwood dropped the avant-garde pose that he's adopted for most of his other classical compositions and indulged in a bit of tender-hearted Romanticism that was nothing if not charming. This kind of honesty was not much in evidence in his team up with Penderecki last night at the Barbican. It's Read more ...
fisun.guner
The Master and Margarita is a rare beast. Not only is it considered to be one of the greatest novels of the 20th century, it also regularly tops reader-lists of all-time favourite books. So it’s no wonder that, since its publication in 1966, 26 years after the author’s early death, Mikhail Bulgakov’s Soviet-era masterpiece has attracted a steady stream of film-makers and theatre directors. But their adaptations have so often floundered that one genuinely fears for anyone fearless, or foolhardy, enough to take it on. With its genre-shifting multiple narratives and dense allegorical layers, Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Krzysztof Penderecki's Polymorphia for 48 string instruments dates back to 1962, and still stands as one of the grand milestones of the avant-garde. It epitomised the Polish composer's technique of "timbre organisation", in which the plucking and bowing of strings was merely a small part of an astounding array of effects."I had to develop some new techniques to produce this kind of sound, using different kids of vibrato," Penderecki explains, down the phone from Kraków. "Using the tailpiece to play on with the double basses and celli, also playing directly on the bridge using the highest Read more ...
Ismene Brown
Critical, urgent, hard - those are the three words used about the challenge to get the rich to pay more for the arts by the new man at the tiller. He should know. Jonathan Moulds, European President at Bank of America Merrill Lynch, is one of the super-successful, super-wealthy financiers to whom the Cameron government is desperately looking to pick up the slack as they cut back public spending. What the government hopes for is modern-day Medicis - arts patrons who use their wealth to back orchestras, performers, theatres and educational projects - and lots of them. The lobby group for this Read more ...
howard.male
I must confess I wasn’t particularly looking forward to last night’s concert from the great elder statesman of South African music. This was largely because his most recent album Jabulani – recorded as a tribute to all the township weddings he went to as a child and youth – was marred by sentimentality and a lacklustre production. But then again one obviously shouldn’t be expecting the music of a 73-year-old to still be as fired-up as the work he produced in his prime.However, it quickly became apparent that Masekela wasn’t simply here to flog the new album. This is a musician who clearly Read more ...
geoff brown
For more than 10 years now I have been waiting in vain for the pianist Evgeny Kissin to shatter the stereotyped image built around him by music critics who haven’t always liked what they’ve heard. You know the kind of thing: Kissin the visitor from outer space, the strange performer who bows to the audience like a priest at a religious rite, displays plenty of peerless technique, but after decades cocooned and fêted on the virtuoso circuit appears too often emotionally remote, as if his feelings had been locked in his dressing-room fridge or maybe a strongbox in Siberia.I recognise much of Read more ...