Barbican
Kontakthof, Tanztheater Wuppertal Pina Bausch, Barbican TheatreSunday, 04 April 2010
A house of contact, a place to make contact - this bare, evocative title sits on one of Pina Bausch’s most appealing works, and also its most elastic. Brought this week to the Barbican posthumously, staged by her company on two amateur casts,... Read more... |
Abdullah Ibrahim, Barbican HallThursday, 01 April 2010
Like Hugh Masekela, pianist Abdullah Ibrahim first emerged as a member of The Jazz Epistles - that seminal, if short-lived, group who at the start of the 1960s were the first to offer a South African take on modern jazz. Both under the stage name... Read more... |
theartsdesk Q&A: Meeting Pina BauschTuesday, 30 March 2010
This week the world-renowned Tanztheater Wuppertal Pina Bausch arrives in London - for the first time, without its towering creator. Last summer the German choreographer died at the age of 68. The company intends to continue, despite the dodgy track... Read more... |
London Symphony Orchestra, Ticciati, Barbican HallFriday, 26 March 2010
It’s a very assured - not to say very brave - young conductor who chooses to make his debut with the London Symphony Orchestra in Sibelius’ notoriously challenging Seventh Symphony. Mighty talents have fallen at this particular fence, defeated by... Read more... |
4.48 Psychosis, Barbican TheatreWednesday, 24 March 2010
Sarah Kane’s last play is the stuff of legend. Since its first production some 18 months after her suicide in 1999, it’s become a favourite with black-attired drama students, nostalgic in-yer-face drama buffs and mainstream theatres all over... Read more... |
Hilary Hahn, Violin and Voice, BarbicanTuesday, 23 March 2010
Concert programming can become a little bit predictable, don’t you think? If we’re honest, there are quite a lot of standard programmes bouncing around our halls at the moment. Don’t get me wrong; I understand that putting together an original and... Read more... |
Magnetic Fields, Barbican HallTuesday, 23 March 2010
The Magnetic Fields were in London for a concert that could only have been, for them, a less frenetic affair than their last appearance in the capital a couple of years ago, when they arrived at the airport to find that their entire collection of... Read more... |
Magnetic Fields, Variety music?Thursday, 18 March 2010
If music writers love to place artists in genres, it is a more-than-usually fruitless task with Magnetic Fields, the brainchild of “composer, multi-instrumentalist and bubblegum purist” Stephin Merritt. Many people discovered Magnetic Fields (named... Read more... |
Hackney Empire savedFriday, 12 March 2010Theatre lovers and theatre-history devotees alike will be delighted by the news that the Hackney Empire in east London, which went dark last month, is to be saved. A property developer will pay the theatre an unspecified sum to create 25 flats in... Read more... |
Circa, Barbican TheatreFriday, 12 March 2010
One of the daily tragedies of being human is that notions in our heads of unaided flight, levitation - any thought of lift-off from our material horizon - lie in drastic disproportion to what flesh and muscle permit. As children, we dream of flying... Read more... |
Bach B minor Mass, The Sixteen, Barbican HallThursday, 11 March 2010
As one who came to know the B minor Mass singing in a clogged, 150-strong choir, I welcomed the authentic-movement rush in the 1980s to whittle it down to What Bach Might Have Wanted (if, indeed, he had lived to hear his ideal religious... Read more... |
Kaija Saariaho's Émilie, Opéra de LyonTuesday, 09 March 2010
The new millennium shimmered into earshot with a musical masterpiece from a female Finn. Kaija Saariaho's L'Amour de Loin (2000) appeared to open up an enticing new operatic sound world, less dogmatic, more instinctive, colourful and intense, very... Read more... |
