Barbican
Adam Sweeting
Krzysztof Penderecki's Polymorphia for 48 string instruments dates back to 1962, and still stands as one of the grand milestones of the avant-garde. It epitomised the Polish composer's technique of "timbre organisation", in which the plucking and bowing of strings was merely a small part of an astounding array of effects."I had to develop some new techniques to produce this kind of sound, using different kids of vibrato," Penderecki explains, down the phone from Kraków. "Using the tailpiece to play on with the double basses and celli, also playing directly on the bridge using the highest Read more ...
Ismene Brown
Critical, urgent, hard - those are the three words used about the challenge to get the rich to pay more for the arts by the new man at the tiller. He should know. Jonathan Moulds, European President at Bank of America Merrill Lynch, is one of the super-successful, super-wealthy financiers to whom the Cameron government is desperately looking to pick up the slack as they cut back public spending. What the government hopes for is modern-day Medicis - arts patrons who use their wealth to back orchestras, performers, theatres and educational projects - and lots of them. The lobby group for this Read more ...
howard.male
I must confess I wasn’t particularly looking forward to last night’s concert from the great elder statesman of South African music. This was largely because his most recent album Jabulani – recorded as a tribute to all the township weddings he went to as a child and youth – was marred by sentimentality and a lacklustre production. But then again one obviously shouldn’t be expecting the music of a 73-year-old to still be as fired-up as the work he produced in his prime.However, it quickly became apparent that Masekela wasn’t simply here to flog the new album. This is a musician who clearly Read more ...
geoff brown
For more than 10 years now I have been waiting in vain for the pianist Evgeny Kissin to shatter the stereotyped image built around him by music critics who haven’t always liked what they’ve heard. You know the kind of thing: Kissin the visitor from outer space, the strange performer who bows to the audience like a priest at a religious rite, displays plenty of peerless technique, but after decades cocooned and fêted on the virtuoso circuit appears too often emotionally remote, as if his feelings had been locked in his dressing-room fridge or maybe a strongbox in Siberia.I recognise much of Read more ...
alexandra.coghlan
Love it or hate it Christopher Alden’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream at English National Opera last year made quite the impact, banishing any fey woodland glades and general waftiness from Benjamin Britten’s opera and embracing a rather more astringent visual aesthetic. It’s unfortunate then that Martin Lloyd-Evans’s production for the Guildhall School of Music and Drama should follow so closely behind, begging comparisons that don’t best serve his World War II interpretation. A lack of directorial coherence mars what visually and vocally is a fine evening, and while Shakespeare may restore order Read more ...
Marina Vaizey
A remarkably tidy parade of thousands upon thousands of objects, neatly grouped into their categories – soap, plastic bottles, cooking pots and utensils, empty cardboard boxes, shoes, flower pots, gloves, string, to name but a few – Waste Not is a deeply disturbing yet affecting display of the obsessive accumulation of sheer stuff. These are the household goods of Zhao Xiang Yuan, the mother of the Chinese conceptual artist Song Dong, collected over five decades of family life. Xiang Yuan and her family suffered the usual outrageous reversals of fortune common to most of the Chinese Read more ...
igor.toronyilalic
To Charles Rosen it was a work of "rarely redeemed dullness". The wife of Emperor Leopold called it "German rubbish". It's pretty obvious why so many have objected to Mozart's final opera La clemenza di Tito. Tunes (memorable ones) are by and large lacking, which is odd for Mozart. The overture is not something you'd want to hear on its own. And the work's great solo arias are unwieldy in form (though fascinatingly so) and tricky to sing and separated by the vast wastes of a notorious recitative. Yet for me what the work lacks, it more than makes up for in dramatic clarity and economy, Read more ...
alexandra.coghlan
Another week, another tragedy, and another wedding dance routine set to a thumping soundtrack. But while The Changeling buckled under the pressure Joe Hill-Gibbins applied at the Young Vic a few weeks ago, Cheek by Jowl’s ‘Tis Pity She’s A Whore bleeds fresh and glossy under Declan Donnellan’s assured touch. This pop-culture remix of a Jacobean classic will pulse long in ears and eyes – a macabre delight that makes a first-rate evening out of a rather second-rate play.Bringing up the rear of the funeral cortege that is revenge tragedy, John Ford’s Tis Pity She’s A Whore finds the genre going Read more ...
geoff brown
It’s over 30 years since André Previn left his post as principal conductor of the London Symphony Orchestra. But once you’re part of the LSO’s treasured ‘family of artists’, the orchestra never lets go, year upon year inviting you back for Christmas, New Year, weddings, bar mitzvahs, any occasion going. The same with the violinist Anne-Sophie Mutter – briefly in the last decade Previn’s fifth wife, though they share the same platform with just as much ease now that they’re divorced.Sunday’s unusually diverting concert formed part of the LSO’s "Artist Portrait" of Mutter: a portrait hardly Read more ...
igor.toronyilalic
The problem with being the closest major European capital to the United States is that touring American orchestras always visit us first or last. When they hit London, they're exhausted. This was very noticeable the first time the New York Philharmonic dropped by with their new chief conductor Alan Gilbert a few years back. They were a pale and baggy-eyed lot compared to the alert team I'd seen and heard just a few months before in New York. This time exhaustion wasn't the problem. They hadn't performed Mahler Nine since early January when the fourth movement was interrupted by the Read more ...
peter.quinn
Naturally 7 represent the point where close-harmony singing, beatboxing and spookily accurate instrumental imitation meet. The US septet call it "vocal play" - the voice as instrument - and last night they sent dopamine levels soaring in the Barbican. The group conveys the beat-driven swagger of hip hop, the freewheeling improv of jazz and the trenchant emotion of soul, often within the confines of a single song. Their arrangements, courtesy of MD Roger Thomas, possess such textural imagination and technical finesse that they're able to traverse genres seemingly without artifice.Part of the Read more ...
judith.flanders
Dickens has been getting all the press in his 200th year, but there is another performer, even older, who celebrates: in 2012, Mr Punch, of Punch and Judy fame, is 350 years old, and Improbable, in revitalising the old showman’s tradition, has given him the best birthday present that can be imagined.Improbable’s Punch and Judy is the story of Mr Punch and his poor battered wife and child – not to forget Toby the dog – as presented by two old turn-of-the-century troupers, Mr Harvey and Mr Hovey, played by Nick Haverson (pictured right) and Rob Thirtle, dressed à la Chaplin, complete with tail- Read more ...