There was a fair amount of blue and yellow worn and displayed for the Ukrainian Freedom Orchestra’s last concert of their European tour. With Madame Zelanska now its patron, the orchestra was formed last year by Keri-Lynn Wilson (Canadian with one side of her family Ukrainian), bringing together Ukrainian musicians, some working in other orchestras, …
For many jazz fans, the classic template for a tenor saxophone jazz quartet is the John Coltrane Quartet (1960-65); so it’s sobering to think that the Branford Marsalis Quartet, founded in 1986 with very few personnel changes since, has existed for over seven times as long. The bassist Eric Revis joined in 1997, pianist Joey …
An Evening with Branford Marsalis: EFG London Jazz Festival Summer Series 2023 Read More »
Of all the concerts being promoted as Sir Simon Rattle’s last as LSO music director this repeat of the previous night’s Barbican Hall event was perhaps the most plausible contender. The Messiaen will be heard again in Edinburgh and Bucharest – that’s in addition to Berg’s Wozzeck (and more) at the Festival d’Aix-en-Provence plus a Mahler 9 …
The film mogul Alexander Korda released his science-fiction vision Things to Come in 1936. The four horsemen of the apocalypse are on the war path, spreading liberal doses of death, famine, conflict and pestilence over our (unspecified but obvious) sceptered isle. In their wake rise fascism, ignorance and regression – there’s a famous image in …
There have been quite a few film versions of the Anglo-Saxon epic myth Beowulf, a cinematic gift that keeps on giving with a ferocious dragon, a dashing hero, and lots of blood, teeth and talons. And now there is Iain Bell’s Beowulf, a cantata (or oratorio?) for big orchestra, no-less-big chorus, tenor and a narrator. Stuart …
BBC Symphony Orchestra – Martyn Brabbins conducts Beowulf and Job Read More »
Vilde Frang took the Elgar into her repertoire some five years ago and she has the measure of one of the composer’s most private, oblique works. It may have been commissioned by and dedicated to Fritz Kreisler but it is better known for the mysterious Spanish quotation Elgar included in the score, translated as “Here …
The last time I heard Evgeny Kissin in a solo recital was here, at the Barbican, in 2019, a full year before Covid-chaos and three before the Ukraine war, the latter something the famously reserved Russian virtuoso has been very articulate about. His stage persona remains very much the same as it was since the …
When Seong-Jin Cho won the Chopin prize in 2015, the Korean pianist looked more a boy than a young man of twenty-one. In the following eight years, his stature as an artist has grown stratospherically, and while he may have embarked on his career as a formidable Chopin player, he has been moving into bigger, …
Like many of Janáček’s mature operas, Katya Kabanova is so rooted in the particularities of the time and place in which it is set – though such are the human interests at play that they can be easily adapted to other contexts – that it doesn’t matter if the work is removed from the stage entirely and performed …
Four years ago the Australian Chamber Orchestra scored a big success with its accompaniment to Jennifer Peedom’s film Mountain (2017) at the Barbican Hall. Now the ensemble tried to repeat the success with Peedom’s new film River (2021) but to more mixed effect. In this 75-minute documentary, shown in modified form for live performance, most …
