Barbican
igor.toronyilalic
Word was that four strings had broken in rehearsals. One had snapped only half an hour before the start of last night's Liszt-fest at the Barbican. It meant one of two things: either pianist Evgeny Kissin had finally switched off the safety-first autopilot that some had worried had taken hold of this former child prodigy. Or we had a dodgy piano. Thankfully, it was the former. The Russian was a transformed pianist in these transformative works. He had flicked the switch from autopilot to shaman. But before we got to the epic, David Copperfield-like acts of magic of the second half - Read more ...
josh.spero
It is probably a worrying sign when the computer games of your youth become the historical butt of a conceptual art joke. Digital artist Cory Arcangel, who appropriates video-game technology, repurposes and redesigns it, has installed 14 10-pin bowling computer games in the Barbican's Curve gallery, and if you remember the earliest, an Atari, you're almost certainly as obsolescent as it is.The Curve is a perfect space for this piece: the games are projected onto its long, high, smooth wall, the images 20 feet high, so you seamlessly trace the evolution of these bowling games as you wind Read more ...
howard.male
As a world music critic one gets used to the stream of superlatives that generally arrive in the wake of whatever big new act is being plugged. World music promoters have a particularly hard job because they don’t just want to preach to the converted; they also want to try to get some new listeners to widen their musical horizons a little. So even before I’d heard a note of the Creole Choir of Cuba I knew that they’d gone down a storm at the Edinburgh Festival, that Jools Holland’s producer wanted them for Later..., and that they were booked to do various BBC radio sessions.The predictable Read more ...
bruce.dessau
Joan Wasser, who operates under the name of Joan As Police Woman, has probably seen all sorts in her time, having played with Antony Hegarty and Rufus Wainwright and dated the late Jeff Buckley. But even she was thrown by an inappropriate comment from the stalls at the Barbican last night. "Show us your tits" is the sort of thing female comedians in working men’s clubs, not soulful, passionate musicians in concert halls, have to put up with.As well as that unexpected heckle worthy of the Frankie Boyle brigade, there were a number of issues at this gig which nearly derailed it. There were Read more ...
David Nice
As Mahler symphonies rain down from heaven - or flare up from hell, according to your viewpoint - in this second anniversary year, it's wise to choose carefully. But why earmark Jiří Bělohlávek's performance of the Sixth above the likes of Gergiev, Dudamel, Jurowski or Maazel? Because he's been working his way through the cycle with his BBC orchestra at the careful rate of one a year; because he knows what space to give, and what colours to draw; and above all, because he refuses to batter our hearts too fiercely too soon - crucial for the most insistent tragic chapter in Mahler's symphonic Read more ...
carole.woddis
Back in the early 1960s, anyone with half a curious cultural brain in their heads would take themselves off to small fleapit cinemas like The Academy or the Classic in Oxford Street (now defunct). There you could catch the latest European art film. And at one of these I remember seeing Italian director Antonioni’s La Notte with Jeanne Moreau and Marcello Mastroianni. Such was its impact that neither I nor the flat mates I was with were able to utter a word until we reached home.That, of course, may have been due to the fact that we were confused and not willing to show it; on the other Read more ...
igor.toronyilalic
So Starbucks-like is its reach, so tarnished its modern legacy, it's easy to overlook just how brilliant the ideology of Christianity is. How seductively counterintuitive the idea of a God who was not just a man but a bum of a man must have seemed. Not until the Arab warrior Muhammed came to his calling was Christianity's first strategy seriously challenged. That winning early Christian message, which sought to seize hearts and minds through self-effacement, is what Elgar seems to seek to capture in The Kingdom. It was receiving a rare performance last night at the Barbican. Read more ...
Peter Culshaw
A midwinter night’s dream at the Barbican. Those who like their pop music performed by chaps with jeans, preferably gazing at their shoes, and are attached to certain ideas of authenticity would have run screaming for the exit. The Irrepressibles were pop as icy spectacle, as dizzying melodrama, while Gabby Young & Other Animals were raiding the musical dressing-up box and emerging with bits of French chanson, German cabaret and slinky tangos, and having a ball doing it.Gabby Young’s band created their own party atmosphere and invited the audience along. Their brand of recession chic Read more ...
fisun.guner
Robert Lepage is not just one of the most fêted and sought-after theatre directors in the world; he is also one of the most prolific. His international breakthrough came with The Dragon Trilogy in 1985, and since then the French-Canadian’s work has been seen across the globe. His stunningly ambitious production of Wagner’s Ring cycle was recently performed at the Metropolitan Opera, New York, and he conceived and directed Cirque du Soleil’s latest acrobatic blockbuster, Totem, which can currently be seen at the Royal Albert Hall. Meanwhile, he has also found time to add dancing to his Read more ...
David Nice
Believe it or not, some critics can't get enough of London's superabundant concert scene. I could hardly be sour about not catching Gustavo Dudamel's first Barbican concert on Thursday night, spellbound as I was by his predecessor at the Los Angeles Philharmonic, Esa-Pekka Salonen, spinning such insidiously beautiful Bartók with the Philharmonia over on the South Bank. Yesterday lunchtime I caught Dudamel coaching 80 of the city's young musicians in the finale of the Beethoven Seventh I'd missed before he went on that night to conduct Mahler's Ninth, surely the symphonic repertoire's supreme Read more ...
igor.toronyilalic
There had been murmurings that his star had dimmed. That Gustavo Dudamel's partnership with the Los Angeles Philharmonic (greeted with such fanfare in 2009) had yet to set the West Coast on fire. Had this Icarus flown too high? Would their debut visit to the Barbican last night resemble Breughel's fall, Latino legs flailing in an orchestral sea? Not a bit of it.Admittedly, we had to wait until the second half for something truly special to happen. The first half didn't really give Dudamel much chance to show off any of his many talents. In the John Adams opener, Slonimsky's Earbox (1995), Read more ...
Ismene Brown
Five people stand in the dark. A bleak gantry descends with a rumble onto their heads. They scuttle under it and flatten themselves to escape a crushing, but then they get up and start building. The platform is stripped of planks, rebuilt at crazy angles, refashioned while decorating the tasks with acrobatic surprises. At a steep tilt a plank is both a slide and human catapult, or makes a terrific wobbling noise if slapped right; as an upright it’s perfect for a girl to shin up and then array herself in a bouffant Boucher Pompadour dress of crumpled paper, later to be elegantly torn off in Read more ...