20th century
Schwitters in Britain, Tate BritainWednesday, 30 January 2013
The Pop Art collages of Richard Hamilton and Eduardo Paolozzi and, more recently, the wayward sculptures and installations of artists like Phyllida Barlow would be unthinkable without the inspirational presence in Britain of Kurt Schwitters. Yet the... Read more... |
LSO, St Lawrence String Quartet, Adams, BarbicanMonday, 28 January 2013
And so John Adams’s residency with the London Symphony Orchestra reaches its finale – a brisk allegro of a concert with a cheeky coda in the form of the composer’s latest orchestral work, Absolute Jest. One of contemporary music’s most articulate... Read more... |
The Dream of Gerontius, LPO, Elder, Royal Festival HallSunday, 27 January 2013
We’re still in the foothills of the Southbank Centre’s year-long The Rest is Noise festival, but already the harmonic ground is becoming unsteady underfoot. Last weekend saw the gemütlichkeit of Johann Strauss give way to the brutality of Richard... Read more... |
Q&A Special: Memories of LutosławskiSaturday, 26 January 2013
While the history of 20th-century music is undoubtedly the history of the 20th century – from the decadent expressionism of fin-de-siècle Berlin to the imagined surrealist worlds of 1920s Paris – few composers lived or wrote the century quite as... Read more... |
Onegin, Royal BalletSunday, 20 January 2013
The worldwide success of John Cranko’s 1960s version of Tchaikovsky’s opera, in turn an adaptation of Pushkin’s verse-drama, might have taken even the choreographer by surprise. Tchaikovsky himself worried that “Pushkin’s exquisite texture will be... Read more... |
Mattila, Hampson, LPO, Jurowski, Royal Festival HallSunday, 20 January 2013
This may have been the official, lavish fanfare for the Southbank’s The Rest is Noise Festival, which if the hard sell hasn’t hit you yet is a year-long celebration of 20th Century music in its cultural context and based around Alex Ross's... Read more... |
Grosvenor, BBC Symphony Orchestra, Litton, Barbican HallSaturday, 12 January 2013
Elgar declared a “massive hope in the future” as the human programme behind his epic First Symphony’s final exultant sprint. That hope was sprinkled like gold dust around the featured artists of this all-English concert. There are good reasons to be... Read more... |
Mr Selfridge, ITV1Monday, 07 January 2013
Welcome to the marble halls of Mr Selfridge. All the world, in ITV’s new costumer (in every sense), isn’t a stage - it’s a shop. And bestriding his eponymous Oxford Street emporium, which we saw in this first episode in the run-up to its 1909 grand... Read more... |
Neither God nor Devil: The long dance between Technology and MusicThursday, 03 January 2013
David Byrne's new book How Music Works has once again brought to the fore the ever thorny debate about the relationship between technology and music. The dance between the two is being conducted at an ever more frenetic pace, and seems likely to... Read more... |
Kavakos, Matsuev, London Symphony Orchestra, Gergiev, BarbicanThursday, 20 December 2012
Valery Gergiev’s exploration of the music of Karol Szymanowski is one of the most vitalising series mounted at the Barbican in recent years - to compare, say, with Sir Colin Davis’s Sibelius and Berlioz, Michael Tilson Thomas’s tributes to Leonard... Read more... |
London Symphony Orchestra, Gergiev, Barbican HallWednesday, 19 December 2012
Valery Gergiev is a human dynamo. Even before embarking on the latest tranche of his (slightly curious) pairing of Szymanowski and Brahms with the London Symphony Orchestra, of which he has been principal conductor since 2007, at the Barbican, the... Read more... |
Hymn/Cocktail Sticks, National TheatreMonday, 17 December 2012
“You don’t put yourself into what you write, you find yourself there.” It’s a maxim that has guided a writing career that, insect-like, has made itself at home among the lived detritus of autobiography and memoir. In Alan Bennett’s 2001 Hymn and his... Read more... |
