Barbican
Kaufmann, Mattila, LSO, Pappano, BarbicanThursday, 09 February 2017
Jonas Kaufmann’s legion of admirers could rest content. A well-received Lieder evening last week demonstrated that the world’s hottest tenor property had returned, both to London for a three-concert residency at the Barbican, and indeed to singing... Read more... |
The private life of Stefan Zweig in EnglandThursday, 09 February 2017
On 23 February 1942 at half past four in the afternoon in a secluded Brazilian hilltown called Petrópolis about an hour from Rio, a maid and her husband pushed at the bedroom door of a modest rented house. Despite the late hour, the tenants had not... Read more... |
Widmann, BBCSO, Oramo, BarbicanSaturday, 04 February 2017
The BBC Symphony Orchestra has continued its long-standing support of British contemporary music with this première of a new commission, Michael Zev Gordon’s Violin Concerto for violinist Carolin Widmann. Gordon’s music deals in abstracts – new and... Read more... |
LSO, Rattle, BarbicanFriday, 20 January 2017
Symphony is a word carrying heavy historical baggage. It’s understandable when composers dig for inspiration elsewhere. All the same, Mark-Anthony Turnage has grasped the symphonic nettle with Remembering – In memoriam Evan Scofield which received... Read more... |
Le Grand Macabre, LSO, Rattle, BarbicanSunday, 15 January 2017
The Big Mac – as in Ligeti's music-theatre fantasia on the possible death of Death – is here to stay. Back in 1990, three critics (I was one) were invited on to the BBC World Service to say which work from the previous decade we thought... Read more... |
Written on Skin, Royal OperaSaturday, 14 January 2017
There’s a passage in Martin Crimp’s impeccable libretto for Written on Skin that describes a page of illuminated manuscript. The ink, he tells us, stays forever wet – alive with moist, fleshy, indecent human reality rather than dried into decorous... Read more... |
Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra, Gatti, BarbicanTuesday, 20 December 2016
Time was when the principal conductor of a top orchestra could afford to refine mastery of a small and familiar repertoire, covering a century and a half of music at most. The rest he (always he) would leave to loyal or youthful lieutenants. The... Read more... |
Monteverdi Choir, English Baroque Soloists, Gardiner, BarbicanTuesday, 13 December 2016
Add three natural trumpets, flawlessly wielded, to chorus and standard period-instrument orchestra, and the seasonal spirit will flow no matter the context. It's true that Bach's Magnificat is not that common a visitor at this time of year -... Read more... |
Gerald Finley, Antonio Pappano, BarbicanMonday, 12 December 2016
This would have been an intriguing recital at any time. But in the context of Brexit, a programme of songs in a second language, of music expressing composers’ fascination with another country, another landscape, another sound-world, had a poignancy... Read more... |
Josefowicz, LSO, Adams, BarbicanFriday, 09 December 2016
Praise be to the spell cast by top players on great composers. Without the phenomenon that is Leila Josefowicz, John Adams would never have created his often prolix, fitfully hair-raising Scheherazade.2, more "dramatic symphony" for violin and... Read more... |
El Niño, LSO, Adams, BarbicanMonday, 05 December 2016
Second and third times lucky: after the migraine-inducing multimedia overload of Peter Sellars's premiere production of El Niño, first seen in London in 2003 and subsequently excoriated in eloquent prose by the composer himself, John Adams's layered... Read more... |
Douglas, LSO, Søndergård, BarbicanWednesday, 30 November 2016
Thomas Søndergård stood in for this concert at a day’s notice – Valery Gergiev is apparently recovering from a knee operation and unable to travel. He left behind a curious programme, centred around Prokofiev’s quirky but dour Sixth Symphony. It’s a... Read more... |
