Barbican
Ryoji Ikeda: superposition, Barbican TheatreThursday, 28 March 2013
It’s not often that a performance’s technological properties leaves you simply slack-jawed. Robert Wilson’s very long Swedish-language version of Strindberg’s A Dream Play did – at the same venue, though this time in 2001 – when the surtitle... Read more... |
Los Angeles Philharmonic, Dudamel, Barbican HallMonday, 18 March 2013
Zipangu. What a name for a piece of music. Such a strange and suggestive collection of vowels and consonants. Such a musical string of sounds. A fascinating name. The name, in fact, the programme told me, for Japan during the time of Marco Polo. The... Read more... |
The Gospel According to the Other Mary, Los Angeles Philharmonic, Dudamel, Barbican HallSunday, 17 March 2013
“I do not believe in miracles,” scoffs Herodias in Oscar Wilde’s - and Richard Strauss’s - Salome. “I have seen too many.” I know how she feels. So it was a bit of a shock to find the highest-kicking of today’s composers, John Adams, and his... Read more... |
Pereira, LA Phil New Music Group, Dudamel, Adams, Barbican HallFriday, 15 March 2013
For finding new popes as much as for hunting down new music, looking to the ends of the earth seems a fruitful route to take. Last night saw the start of the Los Angeles Philharmonic's Barbican residency with their principal conductor, Gustavo... Read more... |
Kinoteka: The Polish Film FestivalThursday, 14 March 2013
Over the last few years the Poles have been pumping money into the arts, partly as a way of branding the country (it works according to their research – many of us are now as likely to think of jazz musicians as plumbers when we think of the country... Read more... |
Phaëton, Les Talens Lyriques, Rousset, Barbican HallSaturday, 09 March 2013
Excess of light and heat sends sun-god Apollo’s son Phaeton tumbling from his father’s chariot. The light was iridescent and the temperature well conditioned as peerless Christophe Rousset led his period-instrument Les Talens Lyriques and a variable... Read more... |
Filming John AdamsTuesday, 05 March 2013
When I first approached John Adams with the idea of making a documentary about him, he gently but firmly turned me down: he had unequivocally bad memories of a film made a few years back, an uncomfortable ride with a director who thought nothing of... Read more... |
Watt, Barbican Pit TheatreFriday, 01 March 2013
It begins with a tall, thin man walking out of light and into darkness. There is much that remains murky in Barry McGovern’s adaptation of this novel by Samuel Beckett, written between 1941 and 1945 when Beckett, who had worked for the Resistance,... Read more... |
John Cage Lecture on Nothing, Barbican TheatreTuesday, 26 February 2013
“I have nothing to say, and I am saying it. And that is poetry.” Originally delivered by John Cage at an artists’ club in New York in 1949, the composer’s Lecture On Nothing went on to become a core text within his 1961 collage-meditation of essays... Read more... |
Wang, BBC Symphony Orchestra, Dausgaard, Barbican HallSaturday, 23 February 2013
Orchestral volcanoes were erupting all over Europe around the year 1915. It was courageous enough to make a mountain chain out of three of them in a single concert. I was less prepared for the white-heat focus applied by that stalwart Dane Thomas... Read more... |
Vengerov, Golan, Barbican HallThursday, 21 February 2013
Maxim Vengerov’s four-year absence from the London stage is recent enough that any performance by him has the added value of having been clawed back from a jealous god. That a violinist of such explosive talent could have been permanently silenced... Read more... |
The Bride and the Bachelors, Barbican Art GalleryMonday, 18 February 2013
It is often argued that Marcel Duchamp is the single most influential artist of the 20th century, and that Fountain, the porcelain urinal he signed R. Mutt and presented to the world in 1917, the single most influential artwork. But that’s not... Read more... |
