Barbican
igor.toronyilalic
This season's LSO artist-in-focus, violinist Viktoria Mullova, is an incorrigible off-roader. The rougher the terrain the better. Early, modern, rock, folk: she'll absorb their shocks, vault their bumps, relish their pitfalls and come out without so much as a scratch. So Mullova's opening concert last night was intriguing. Prokofiev's Second Violin Concerto isn't exactly smooth terrain, but its roughness is pretty suburban.Mullova's approach was typically counterintuitive. There was no attempt to rough things up. She played to the work's inner shyness and tenderness. When a game of hide-and- Read more ...
howard.male
After only a couple of songs there are shouts from the audience to turn Mulatu up. But these people have missed the point. The clue is in the name of the instrument he's playing: the vibraphone, or vibes for short. The word "vibe" has long been slang for “a good feeling” or a mood, and that’s precisely what its role was in last night’s concert; to add some of that ambient mysteriousness intrinsic to the five-note Ethiopian scale. Mulato Astatke, the supernaturally calm 67-year-old, delicately bounced his three wooden mallets off its aluminium bars, and an enraptured Barbican audience was Read more ...
sheila.johnston
It's the Mousetrap of musicals, the wholly unstoppable show and, to mark its 25th anniversary this year (the 30th, if you date it back to the initial French concept album and Paris production), it will be staged in London at three different venues. You can even see them all in a single, mighty weekend bender, if the mood takes you: the original Les Misérables at the Queen's Theatre, a celebratory all-star concert at the O2 Arena on 3 October and an invigorating new production which plays at the Barbican after a national tour until 2 October.Sadly, in this annus miserabilis, the festivities Read more ...
david.cheal
This was a warm and convivial evening in the company of the American folky-rootsy-rocky singer and songwriter Josh Ritter. His band made a rich noise, and his voice was keen and true, almost every lyric clearly audible. At the end of this, the last night of Ritter’s UK tour, the crowd – he seems to have a strong female following - were on their feet, and there were several calls of, “We love you, Josh!” from the stalls. And the songs, in which myth and metaphor and stories from the old America summoned up a world of ships and wolves and death and love and mountains (and cars, too), were Read more ...
Veronica Lee
It's a strange thing that boxing, that most dramatic of sports, hasn't been the subject of more plays. It has a protagonist and antagonist, the ring is a ready-made stage, and the sport has thrown up more than its fair share of larger-than-life characters. So, as with buses, when you're waiting for one to come along, two arrive in quick succession; Roy Williams's Sucker Punch, which was at the Royal Court earlier this year, and now the equally brilliant Beautiful Burnout. Comparisons are invidious, so I won't make any, other than to remark that they are two very different beasts.Bryony Lavery Read more ...
Peter Culshaw
With his sublime renditions of Azerbaijan's classical music, Alim Qasimov is one of the world's great performers. On the eve of the singer's appearance at the Barbican’s Transcender Weekend of spiritual trance music, where he is performing this Sunday, theartsdesk recalls a trip to the old Soviet state to drink vodka, play chess and find out about this extraordinary singer."FIZULI!" Alim Qasimov shouts the word and seems to have taken leave of his senses as he mimes a martial art move in the street. I'm already distracted by the startling sight of young Baku beauties in mini-skirts and Read more ...
theartsdesk
There is no consensus about what site-specific theatre actually constitutes. Does it grow organically out of the space in which the theatre piece is performed, and can therefore be staged nowhere else? Or is it no more than any theatre piece which happens away from the constricting formality of the thrust stage or the proscenium arch?Please feel free to debate that at leisure in the comments section below. It suffices to say that, whichever way you slice it, site-specific work has sprouted in the oddest places over the years. Audiences have found themselves summoned to caravans and sent into Read more ...
alexandra.coghlan
If there was an opposite to the limitless “ever after” of fairytales, the relentlessly nullifying "nevermore" of Edgar Allan Poe’s raven would come pretty close. A deformed, sickly smiling "musical fable for adults", the ominously named Nevermore is Canadian theatre company Catalyst’s grim(m) take on the life of that greatest of storytellers, Poe himself. Had Little Red Riding Hood decided to meet the Wolf at an S&M club for a spot of burlesque (and had Nick Cave been on hand to write some songs about the encounter), Nevermore would be the result.More hauntingly macabre than any of his Read more ...
james.woodall
He's a small man, wiry, bespectacled. His three band members - guitarist Pedro Sá, bassist Ricardo Dias Gomes, percussionist Marcelo Callado - must each be about a third his age: a case of three pupils and a professor? Behind them is a screen which, through this one-and-a-half-hour set, will flash up clips of Brazilian seascapes and city scenes, mainly of Rio de Janeiro. Between band and screen is what looks like the wings of a paraglider. It's an odd prop, but people are always paragliding theatrically, perhaps ostentatiously, from and across the vertiginous hills of Rio. Maybe our wiry Read more ...
howard.male
Many press releases from now up until Christmas are sure to begin with the words, “Fresh from wowing the crowds at Glastonbury…”, but that’s not going to stop me using them now with reference to this great Malian band. This is because we world music journalists feel a particular swell of pride when one of our beloved acts breaks through the Womad glass ceiling and gets to bring their complex polyrhythms and weird-looking instruments to the mainstream music fan. And what’s more, in the case of Ngoni ba, I’m sure that they genuinely did “wow” that sea of sun-burnt punters, because Read more ...
igor.toronyilalic
David McVicar's revival production of Handel's oratorio-cum-opera Semele isn't terribly clever or beautiful or impressive, or fecund with ideas or detail or emotion. But it does work. It does tell the story. And what brings colour to its initially rather pasty, unappealing face, and fire and heft to its anaemic belly, is sex and - best of all for those of you who will only be able to catch it in concert at the Barbican next week - one of the most impressive Handel casts I've heard for years.Appropriately for a production as deliberately confused in concept as this one - where the characters Read more ...
Jasper Rees
The wind instrument in everyone's ears at the moment is the vuvuzela (pictured) a South African horn which comes in various lengths and pitches but is of unvarying volume: very loud. You'll be hearing a lot more of it during the World Cup, as it is the noise-polluter of choice for fans of Bafana-Bafana, the South African football team. If you're after a more euphonious blast of wind, however, there is an alternative. Early last year I sat in thunderous proximity to the LSO Brass Ensemble as they performed the iconically scary "Dance of the Knights" theme from Prokofiev's Romeo and Juliet. Read more ...