Final thoughts: a fitting theme for the farewell concert of this year’s Gewandhaus Barbican residency. But the connections proved tenuous: Death and Transfiguration, the gloomy opener, was written when Strauss was only 25, and the Mozart Clarinet Concerto which followed, while it was one of his last works, shows little concern for mortality or summation. But the motivation was honourable – to find homes for Strauss’ tone poems, which rarely fit comfortably in any concert programme.This will probably be the last time that Riccardo Chailly conducts the Gewandhaus Orchestra in the UK (he’s about Read more ...

In practice as well as in prospect, the second in Riccardo Chailly’s Strauss/Mozart trilogy was a concert of two very different halves. The first offered small Bavarian and Austrian beer in the shape of Strauss’s fustian Macbeth, unbelievably close in time to the masterly Don Juan which blazed on Tuesday, and a pretty but just a little too anodyne Mozart violin concerto at the other end of Mozart’s prodigious composing life to the last work for piano and orchestra, which had amazed us in the first concert. Part Two was pure LSD: Also sprach Zarathustra, in which I’d hoped Chailly would invest Read more ...

Riccardo Chailly’s Strauss odyssey with his Leipzig orchestra peaked in Saxony last year, the 150th anniversary of the composer’s birth. I was lucky to catch a razor-sharp Till Eulenspiegel and a saturated Death and Transfiguration in Dresden’s Semperoper close to the birthday. 14 months on, and the Barbican has nothing like the same necessary air to offer around a mini-residency of richly-scored symphonic poems. But Don Juan ought to be the perfect festive opener, and here it leapt into the void as only a truly alive, disciplined interpretation can.This was a great lover very much Read more ...

Stravinsky and Bartók both escaped Europe at the start of the second world war to live in the USA. For Stravinsky it was the start of 30 years of mostly happy exile, while Bartók was to survive for only five years. Works from their time in America featured in Valery Gergiev’s penultimate concert as principal conductor of the LSO last night.Stravinsky’s neoclassical Symphony in C is not often heard in concert – it was the first time I had heard it live – and this performance was not a great advertisement for the piece. Written half in Europe, at a time when the composer’s wife, mother and Read more ...

This Barbican concert began with a Mendelssohn overture and ended with a Haydn symphony. But on stage were the BBC Symphony Orchestra and Ilan Volkov. What did you expect in between, a Mozart piano concerto? Not likely. Instead they gave the first performance of No.48 (night studio) by Richard Ayres. English-born but resident in the Netherlands and working mostly on the Continent, Ayres has impeccable post-Minimalist credentials (studies with Louis Andriessen and Morton Feldman) which do no more than hint at how his music behaves – like a kid in a well-stocked acoustic sweet-shop. Or at a Read more ...

This was Henryk Górecki beyond the Third Symphony. His otherwise ubiquitous masterpiece was notable by its absence from yesterday's programme. That was surely a conscious decision, and a wise one, allowing his many other important works to come out from its shadow. Górecki turned out to be an ideal subject for the BBC Symphony Orchestra’s “Total Immersion” treatment. His music gradually evolved throughout his career, from acerbic neoclassicism, to esoteric serialism, and then to austere minimalism. But the links between the phases outweigh the differences, so hearing music from each in close Read more ...

And so the Academy of Ancient Music’s triptych of Monteverdi operas at the Barbican comes to an end, three years after it began with Orfeo. If 2014’s Poppea was the cycle’s sexually-charged climax, then this Ulisse is the dark, contemplative coda – a sobering moment of morality after the victorious excesses of opera’s most venal couple.Il ritorno d’Ulisse is always a harder sell than Poppea. Virtue, chastity and constancy don’t make for quite such an obvious drama, and the opera’s structural oddities – a complicatedly large cast, an awkward final act – make it tricky to pull off. Benedict Read more ...

With eyes trained on sporty Rio de Janeiro once more for next year’s Olympic Games, cultural portals on to the city are bound to be offered in all sorts of places around the world. One such is Rio+Film, a new film festival at the Barbican Centre focusing exclusively on the great Brazilian city by the sea. Rio+Film is likely to have further editions elsewhere.Curator Adriana Rouanet says the “+” in the festival’s name underlines that the chosen films burrow beneath the usual image of beach, football and carnival. In the Saturday-night hot spot was Fernando Meirelles’ and Kátia Lund’s 2002 Read more ...

Was it when we all obediently received, then held, contemplated, then savoured, then (and only then) swallowed a single grape? Or was it as we paced solemnly round the room for the sixth time, whirling brightly coloured plastic tubing above our heads to make a whirring sound, that the penny dropped? Actually I’m fairly certain it was being exhorted, for the nth time, to “embody alertness”, to feel my “super-alert hands” that did it for me. Don’t be fooled by the marketing: Rolf Hind’s Lost in Thought is no more an opera than I am a yogi.You can talk about meaningful silences or the Japanese Read more ...

In 2007, Jiří Bělohlávek set the distinctive seal on his leadership of the BBC Symphony Orchestra and their ongoing Mahler cycle with a riveting performance of the Third Symphony. The legacy he established of a deep, well-moulded string sound which the orchestra didn’t really have before has left its mark on his successor Sakari Oramo’s even more impassioned attempt at the most epic of all Mahler’s symphonies. We even had the same peerless trombonist, Helen Vollam, awesome in the primeval funeral marches of the first movement, amid a mix of distinguished orchestral soloists old and new. Read more ...

The frail bridge between Baroque and Classical aesthetics was the theme for this debut UK appearance by Insula, the period-orchestra extension to Laurence Equilbey’s superb vocal ensemble accentus.With a chunky harpsichord continuo and urgent pulse, they delivered an instantly engaging response to the Miserere’s pleas for mercy and Zelenka’s relentlessly intense setting of it in which chromatic harmony is stretched on the rack and phrases are hammered in place with stabbing accents. Equilbey (profiled here by David Nice) encouraged the strongest of contrasts between a smooth legato for the Read more ...

Last night's perfectly-judged, superbly communicated performance of Mahler's Fourth Symphony served as a reminder that the passion, experience and astonishing musicality of 86-year-old conductor Bernard Haitink are things to be cherished and never taken for granted. The symphony, first performed in 1901, was the main work in this second of Haitink's three concerts with the LSO before they leave together for Japan.The score contains a minefield of instructions to make constant subtle and sometimes radical adjustments to the tempo. Haitink's understanding of them and how to set them instantly Read more ...