“Two performers at the very pinnacle of their game” “Encore” is the better-bred version of screeching “one more song” while drunk at a concert. Yet to be treated by the “greatest living string player” Maxim Vengerov and the piano spectacular Polina Osetinskaya to four of them seems to be sheer gluttony. It’s a chance to throw a curveball, a break ...
“I’m ready to weep” BBC Symphony Orchestra At the tail end of the Barbican’s Fragile Earth season, we are presented with an idealised vision of America’s past and a stark warning about its (and the world’s) future if the climate crisis is not averted. Aaron Copland wrote three ballets between 1938 and 1944. The final one was for the modern ...
‘Eventual pleasure singularity’ We were only one hour into the eight-plus we had planned at the Barbican Sex Festival and had already hit a roadblock. Wandering around the stained and uncomfortably beautiful clothes of the exhibition Dirty Looks, and coming face to face with a gigantic photograph of a trussed-up vagina (by Michaela Stark), the Bonnie to my Clyde turned ...
‘More man than Pan’ So, Christmas is undeniably here, isn’t it? Halloween held it off for half a month, and then the igniting of an alleged 16th-century traitor slowed it some more. But those sleigh bells were always tingling through the month of October, rather menacingly in the background. Of course, it is the Barbican that confirms it. J.M. Barrie’s ...
‘A tale of two cities, and a story of two shows’ Something that has been flashing around in my skull for a couple of weeks refusing to fit neatly into a review format, but will now be expunged into a feature that will encompass two. I sit here, gazing into one larger screen, with a smaller one clamped to my ...
‘Prefect addition to the glowing riot of culture and glitter that is Pride’ Right, I’ll hold up my red-nailed hands. This review is shamefully late, but your reviewer is but a simple homosexual. A man hopefully a little unlike you, considering all the effort I put into rampant individuality-but a human nevertheless. Drinking, overindulging, struggling through the subsequent Pride bacchanal, ...
‘Show political films politically, and queer films queerly’ Like the vibrating water glass as the T. Rex thumps along in Jurassic Park, Pride unrolls its stomping boots, ready to rampage across the country. But does it have to be only frozen daiquiris, ageing pop stars, and endorsements from arms dealers? The Barbican (and I) say no! So, we, the artistic ...
‘Theatrical beauty’ If you don’t love Fiddler are you even a musical theatre fan? Perhaps you’re not, I do pride myself on the mixed-bag readers of this site. Yet I would argue regardless of your relationship to a step-ball-change, you should. Here’s a quick history lesson, get comfy children. Sholem Aleichem’s Yiddish language stories were carefully musicalised by writer Joseph ...
‘Luminous prose, weaving emotion and poetry’ When London feels like it’s having a hot grey bowl of diffused sunlight pressed down upon it, many flee to the AC-wafted basement of the Barbican. But what is clicking along down there pulls more of a crowd than just those on the hunt for a cool troglodyte refuge. Samuel Beckett returns to one ...
‘swelling and quietly mournful’ We the assembled shuffle in our finery, clothes dancing with embroidered jasmine and cherry blossom. We wait, breath baited for the glowing diamond of classical music: Lang Lang, unassuming in black with a shock of dark hair, pacing on stage to weave the piano magic we have heard so much about. Starting playing at 3 this ...