Barbican
Barbican Centre, 2012 SeasonTuesday, 10 January 2012
London's Barbican Centre is 30 this year, and with a special Olympics subsidy boost as the world's eyes turn to the British capital this summer, it aims to be as lovely inside as it is famously unlovely outside. Film beauties Cate Blanchett and... Read more... |
2011: Mariinsky, Manon, and a German DaneSunday, 01 January 2012
Highlights of the year are always interesting. Things you loved at the time do, sometimes surprisingly, fade very quickly. I really enjoyed the Gabriel Orozco retrospective at the Tate: I thought it inventive and exciting. But now I have hardly any... Read more... |
2011: Ballerinas, Cuts and the Higgs Boson TheorySaturday, 31 December 2011
The year’s best arts story was not the cuts (which isn’t art, it’s politics), but the appearance in Edinburgh of a mysterious series of 10 magical little paper sculptures, smuggled into the city’s libraries by a booklover. No name, no Simon Cowell... Read more... |
BBC Symphony Orchestra, Saraste, Barbican HallSaturday, 17 December 2011
Is it ever a good idea to programme two symphonies by one composer in a single concert? Maverick Valery Gergiev is likely to stand alone in applying the rule to Mahler. Yet curiously his Prom marathon of two big instalments made more sense as stages... Read more... |
London Symphony Orchestra, Gardiner, Barbican HallFriday, 16 December 2011
Just a few weeks ago, John Eliot Gardiner and his Orchestre Révolutionnaire et Romantique delivered what was unquestionably one of the year’s finest concerts – performing Beethoven’s Fourth and Seventh Symphonies with more wit, swagger and verve... Read more... |
BBC Symphony Orchestra, Gardner, Barbican HallSunday, 11 December 2011
It’s typical: you wait ages for a Belshazzar’s Feast and then two come along at once. And judging by the performance delivered by Ed Gardner and the BBC Symphony Orchestra and Chorus last night, Andrew Nethsingha and his massed Cambridge choirs will... Read more... |
Kate Rusby, Barbican HallSaturday, 03 December 2011
Kate Rusby’s Christmas show was a brilliant way to get that festive feeling. Standing on a stage lit by three huge glittering stars and a collection of colourful glowing baubles, she and her band (“the boys”) worked their way through a surprising... Read more... |
Hamlet, Schaubühne Berlin, Barbican TheatreFriday, 02 December 2011
Ken Russell is, it seems, alive and well and directing Germans in Shakespeare. Actually, no, it's outgrown theatrical terrorist Thomas Ostermeier, but it might as well be our Ken to judge from the fitfully imaginative but repetitive images and the... Read more... |
Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors, BarbicanThursday, 01 December 2011
A Hawk and a Hacksaw began a decade or so ago as a solo project, when Jeremy Barnes stopped drumming with indie-folk cult heroes Neutral Milk Hotel. It was with the 2004 addition of violinist Heather Trost, however, that the sound was found: a... Read more... |
Mutter, London Symphony Orchestra, Gergiev, Barbican HallMonday, 28 November 2011
Praise be, or slava if you prefer, to Valery Gergiev for honouring new Russian music alongside his hallmark interpretations - ever evolving or dangerously volatile according to taste – of Prokofiev, Shostakovich and Stravinsky. Last LSO season... Read more... |
Opera North: making London's flesh creepSunday, 27 November 2011
A disappointed man from Sheffield asked on a blog why Opera North was spoiling pampered London with two of its major productions and an offshoot this season when the rest of its vicinity was going operatically hungry. I can see his point, but we... Read more... |
Mouse on Mars, Oval, Stockhausen, BarbicanSaturday, 26 November 2011
Stockhausen’s Gesang der Jünglinge (Song of the Youths), composed in 1956, is, in many ways, the mother of all electronic music. I can remember discovering it in the 1960s, before I had acquired my first pair of Koss headphones, lying on the floor,... Read more... |
