Barbican
alexandra.coghlan
"There’s no possibility of being witty without a little ill-nature,” preaches the Gospel according to Richard Brinsley Sheridan. What the playwright omits to mention, however, is that it is possible to be ill-natured without in fact being terribly witty, a flaw that proves almost fatal for Warner’s acerbic, alienated new production of The School for Scandal. Overstyling Sheridan’s most stylised of comedies, Warner turns what Hazlitt described as the most “finished and faultless” play into a mass of tensions, exaggerations and contradictions. The result can be exhilarating in the moment, but Read more ...
David Nice
What a relief, for half of last night's semi-staged concert performance, to have left behind Britten's claustrophobic wood at English National Opera and to seek refuge in Smetana's Bohemian village inn of good cheer. Czech music's national comic treasure isn't an opera I feel the need to see in the opera house again; its dramaturgy is thinly spread, its vocal rewards second best to instrumental pleasures. So it was a joy to see a carefully reduced BBC Symphony Orchestra at the heart of things, hypersensitive to doyen JiříBělohlávek's canny interchange of village band and Wagnerian sounds. Read more ...
Jasper Rees
Which came first? The low national self-esteem or the shit national football team? Is it possible, in the interests of blending in with one’s countrymen, to stimulate in oneself a love of the beautiful game? And can Britishness be boiled down to an application test? Total Football, from the two-man company Ridiculusmus, is a fleet-footed comedy which investigates the shifting parameters of what it means to belong in a country where symbols of national pride are hard to come by. Unless you count Wayne Rooney.The drama, to be reductive about a playful, shape-shifting think piece, Read more ...
graham.rickson
This week we review Bellérophon, a rare Baroque opera from Lully which was exhumed by Christophe Rousset and performed for the first time last year, Debussy recorded live from the Barbican, and we answer the key question: how much is too much Percy Grainger? Would, for example, 19 discs be considered sufficient?Debussy: La mer, Jeux, Prélude à l’après-midi d’un faune London Symphony Orchestra/Gergiev (LSO Live)
If you don’t know Debussy’s 1913 tennis-inspired ballet Jeux, then start here. Performed by Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes with choreography by Nijinsky in May 1913, it flopped, and had Read more ...
peter.quinn
Sometimes you can leave a concert feeling slightly shortchanged: a perceived weakness in the programming; an unprepared, lacklustre conductor; a phoned-in performance. No danger of any of the above at the marathon session three of Reverberations, a weekend of concerts at LSO St Luke's and the Barbican devoted to the music and influence of the contemporary US composer Steve Reich. Actually, by the end of the evening, some people may have been ruing just how many artists have fallen under Reich's influence. We filed into the Barbican at 6pm on Saturday. We left the hall at 12.15am on Sunday Read more ...
Russ Coffey
Two cult singers on the same bill. A stirring prospect in itself, but last night they were both also at watersheds in their careers. The headliner, Ron Sexsmith, was looking to cultivate a more mainstream audience. He’s had his moments over the years, such as when he was covered by Chris Martin, Rod Stewart and Curtis Stigers. But last night he seemed to want the fans to have another look at him. On one song he styled himself as a “late bloomer”, but he didn’t need to convince this crowd.Even though producer Bob Rock has done a good job putting some AOR sheen on the new record, the songs are Read more ...
David Nice
With regional youth orchestras dropping from a thousand short-sighted, wholesale cuts - flagship Leicestershire the latest under threat - it should be enough just to celebrate 60 seasons of the LSSO, safe for now under the City of London's munificent wing. But last night was more than just another fun concert. No one ought to miss any appearance of the, ahem, enormously charismatic Leif Segerstam, composer of 244 symphonies to date and master orchestral trainer, who always goes for depth of sound rather than surface glitter. Nor is it every year you get to hear the Britten Cello Symphony, one Read more ...
igor.toronyilalic
"Ne me touchez pas! Ne me touchez pas!" Mélisande's jittery first words could be the motto for the whole of Pelléas et Mélisande. How to touch, what to touch, when to and when not to touch, more specifically, how to mark without bruising, are the subjects and challenges thrown up by Debussy's delicate piece of operatic symbolism. Ones that all the artists in last night's concert performance at the Barbican Hall tackled with incredible levels of musicality.There wasn't just an extraordinary sensitivity to the delicacies of this miraculous score. There was an honouring of the Read more ...
igor.toronyilalic
Some of the most exciting Western classical music being composed today comes from the Far East. Composers from Japan and South Korea - possibly because they find themselves in a different intellectual cycle to us in the West - seem to be able to do things we can't. The BBC Symphony Orchestra dedicated one of their Total Immersion series to Korean Unsuk Chin, an unconventional Modernist whose relationship to melody and storytelling is refreshingly unashamed, but who, on the evidence of the rows of empty seats at the Barbican Hall (there were quite literally more people on stage than in the Read more ...
peter.quinn
The last time I saw Esperanza Spalding live, at Ronnie Scott's towards the end of 2009, the mention of her name would largely have been greeted with quizzical looks. Now, thanks to that astounding Grammy win for Best New Artist and a gazillion disgruntled Justin Bieber fans – seriously, you do not want to mess with those pesky Beliebers - her profile has soared exponentially.Performing songs from her 2010 release, Chamber Music Society, in a single continuous set, Spalding did her utmost to recreate the album's singularly intimate atmosphere – no easy feat in the Barbican. To give some Read more ...
james.woodall
Tradition, in the form of Victorian performance, conferred on The Tempest the VC of Highest Shakespearean Poetry, though it probably wasn't Shakespeare's final play. John Gielgud was in an important sense the last great Victorian English thesp and, in the apparently valedictory role of Prospero, took the island parable to an Olympus of rhetoric. More recent Shakespearean poetics have led us to a drama riven with attacks on its own rhetorical afflatus and most contemporary stagings make Prospero, for a start, a bully. Cheek by Jowl's new version certainly does.This is the company's fourth Read more ...
Ismene Brown
Last night Murray Perahia played Bach, Beethoven, Brahms, Schumann and Chopin, and we heard, quite simply, Bach, Beethoven, Brahms, Schumann and Chopin. Nothing more need be said, if one follows the Cordelia principle to love, and be silent.Still, as you insist, I will add that it was an ideally private experience between him and me, and I dare say, private between him and every other individual sitting in the Barbican Hall. Perahia, now 63, has always had an inclination towards translucency, for making himself the finest possible veil through which to show you the composers, and yet what Read more ...