| Date and venue | Title |
|---|---|
| 14-Jun-2013 Royal Opera House: Linbury Studio Theatre | Gerald Barry's The Importance of Being Earnest staged at the ROH Linbury Studio |
 STEPHEN CUMMISKEY.jpg) Interviewed at the Barbican Centre last year, Stephen Fry described Gerald Barry’s score for The Importance of Being Earnest (2010) rather unfavourably as “taking a machete to a soufflé”. However, this zany opera based on Oscar Wilde’s classic play of 1895 has already emerged victorious from concert premières in Los Angeles and London. It has had audiences guffawing with abandon at its array of Second Viennese School parodies, plate-smashing at the tea table, and musical mash-ups of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony and Auld Lang Syne.Read full review... | |
| 9-Jun-2013 Southbank Centre: Purcell Room | The art of fear, or the fear of art? The Rest is Noise with Karim Said |
 This Sunday, pianist Karim Said returned to the Southbank Centre to put Arnold Schoenberg under the microscope for a third and last time. Performing as part of the International Piano Series 2012/13 and the cataclysmic Rest is Noise festival, Said’s concerts have focused on the genesis of the Second Viennese School. Each event included an introductory talk with Sara Mohr-Pietsch where the musical works were discussed in the context of Alex Ross’ award-winning book The Rest is Noise: Listening to the Twentieth Century (2007).Read full review... | |
| 1-Jun-2013 The London Coliseum | UK première of Philip Glass' The Perfect American at ENO |
 It wasn’t surprising that English National Opera’s UK première of The Perfect American was one of the most eagerly anticipated productions of the summer. Based on a fictitious narrative by Peter Stephan Jungk, the opera offers a timely glance behind the plush curtains of Walt Disney’s animated feature films. The genial grandfather of children’s entertainment is portrayed as a paranoid megalomaniac, his on-screen stories of hope, love and heroism driven by a merciless off-screen dictatorship.Read full review... | |
| 22-May-2013 Southbank Centre: Purcell Room | Luke Bedford in portrait with the London Sinfonietta at the Purcell Room |
 This Wednesday, London Sinfonietta presented Luke Bedford: In Portrait – a concert with a format that seemed almost too good to be true. In a short programme combining Luke Bedford’s Wonderful No-Headed Nightingale (2011–12), Renewal (2012–13) and Gérard Grisey’s Périodes (1974), conductor Sian Edwards and the London Sinfonietta beckoned us into a world of shifting soundscapes.Read full review... | |
| 11-May-2013 LSO St Lukes | A Scream and an Outrage: Session Two at LSO St Luke's |
 The title for this Barbican event certainly threw up some interesting questions. Having failed to attend a riotous dinner party that was characterised by one attendee as “a scream and an outrage”, Nico Muhly set about curating a series of concerts under this title. However, no screams or outrages occurred this weekend. Instead the audience was greeted by the sandal-clad, ponytailed oracles of the New York’s fashionable downtown music scene, whose contributions were gently mesmeric rather than abrasive.
Read full review... | |
| 13-Apr-2013 Barbican Centre: Hall | LSO Futures Week at the Barbican: Symphonic sound worlds |
.jpg) Following on from the Contemporary Chamber Works concert of the LSO Futures series, François-Xavier Roth was back less than an hour later with the Symphonic Sound Worlds programme. This formed the second part of his investigation into the nature of the orchestra, its traditional forms and generic makeup. The title “Symphonic Sound Worlds” hints not only at the expansion of orchestral sounds, but also at the effects of these sounds upon the more general “worlds” within which they are deployed.Read full review... | |
| 13-Apr-2013 Barbican Centre: Hall | LSO Futures Week at the Barbican: Contemporary chamber works |
 Celebrating the work of emerging artists and their 20th-century heritage, the LSO Futures concert series came to a spectacular close this weekend at the Barbican. In a two-part programme devised by conductor François-Xavier Roth, chamber and orchestral forces reckoned with the challenges posed to the symphonic tradition.Read full review... | |
| 3-Apr-2013 Royal Opera House: Linbury Studio Theatre | Opening night of The Firework-Maker's Daughter at the Linbury Studio Theatre |
 This week the Linbury Studio Theatre attracted an audience of the more minute variety with its dazzling production of The Firework-Maker’s Daughter. Based on Philip Pullman’s novel, the two-act opera transported its listeners into the realms of the Far East with papery costumes, Indonesian shadow puppetry and hand-crafted pyrotechnics.Read full review... | |
| 22-Mar-2013 Charlton House | Reactions and Reflections: The music of Les Six at Charlton House |
 Regeneration is currently at the heart of everything that goes on inside the beautifully preserved Charlton House. Built between 1607 and 1612 by Sir Adam Newton, the building and its grounds remain a fine example of Jacobean domestic architecture. That the house has been organising regular lunchtime concerts to showcase students from London’s most eminent conservatoires adds further plumage to its cap.
Read full review... | |
| 21-Mar-2013 Southbank Centre: Royal Festival Hall | A chest of treasures: The Philharmonia's Lutosławski celebrations in London conclude |
 In An Attitude to French Culture the Polish composer Witold Lutosławski remarked “I am aware that of the two traditions that initiated 20th-century music, that is, Schoenberg and Debussy, it is the latter that I feel prevails in my own compositional work”. The Lutosławski centenary concert series at the Southbank Centre sought to trace this lineage by programming Lutosławski’s music alongside works by Claude Debussy, Albert Roussel and Maurice Ravel. Last night an invigorating programme saw this series come to a thrilling close with the Symphony no.Read full review... | |
| 10-Feb-2013 Southbank Centre: Queen Elizabeth Hall | Stravinsky's Renard at The Rest is Noise with Barbara Hannigan and the London Sinfonietta |
 Venturing into the Paris of the 1910s and 1920s, the Southbank Centre’s The Rest is Noise festival continues its journey through a brambly thicket of 20th-century music. Sunday’s programme focused on the output of Igor Stravinsky, the Russian composer who famously engendered riotous uproar at the Paris Opera House in 1913 with his savage ballet Le sacre du printemps. Yet 100 years after this momentous event, Stravinsky’s music still holds surprises in store for us.Read full review... | |
| 8-Feb-2013 Royal College of Music: Britten Theatre | Iain Burnside's Journeying Boys at the Royal College of Music |
 “Bring it on”. This was the response of Nicholas Sears, Head of Vocal Studies at the Royal College of Music, when Iain Burnside sketched out his plan for a music theatre event that would almost certainly cross boundaries of taste. Using Benjamin Britten’s song cycle Les Illuminations as a point of departure, Journeying Boys traces the life of the 19th-century French poet Arthur Rimbaud, whose prose-poem suite Les Illuminations forms the basis of Britten’s composition.Read full review... | |
| 4-Feb-2013 Southbank Centre: Purcell Room | "The invisible world": String quartets from the Royal College of Music celebrate Lutosławski |
 Celebrating the centenary of Polish composer Witold Lutosławski’s birth, the Philharmonia Orchestra have embarked on Woven Words, a series also involving the Royal College of Music. The title, an English translation of Lutosławski’s Paroles tissées (1965), invites audiences to consider a multitude of questions concerning music and meaning. As further provocation, a remark of Claude Debussy’s – “Music begins where words end” – sits underneath this heading: a statement contemplated and challenged by Lutosławski in his writings.Read full review... | |
| 29-Jan-2013 Southbank Centre: Queen Elizabeth Hall | London Sinfonietta tackles Webern for The Rest is Noise |
 The works of Anton Webern – famously described by Stravinksy as “dazzling diamonds” – have been “unwrapped” as part of The Rest is Noise festival this month. This was a timely project, as the output of this Second Viennese School composer has often been misrepresented due to its considerable (and problematic) impact on 20th- and 21st-century music.Read full review... | |
| 24-Jan-2013 Southbank Centre: Queen Elizabeth Hall | Voicing early modernism: The Rest is Noise with Barbara Hannigan |
 Billed as “The soundtrack of the 20th century”, The Rest is Noise season of 2013 has now commenced at the Southbank Centre. Concert programmes scheduled throughout January have focused on the Second Viennese School and its infamous break with western tonality. However, for those bewitched by the descent of music history into an atonal abyss, Thursday’s concert at the Queen Elizabeth Hall offered a refreshing take on the narrative we are apparently so well acquainted with.Read full review... | |
| 13-Dec-2012 Southbank Centre: Royal Festival Hall | Maazel, Trifonov and the Philharmonia play Russian works at the Royal Festival Hall |
 If the graphic design of a concert programme can be said to shape our expectations of the event then the Philharmonia Orchestra’s 2012/13 booklet, on which the press verdict “blazing originality” is encircled by red-hot flames, had perhaps set its sights rather high. Thursday’s concert, however, did not disappoint. Its explosive selection brought together Igor Stravinsky’s suite L’oiseau de feu (“The Firebird”, 1919), Sergei Prokofiev’s Piano Concerto no.Read full review... | |
| 12-Dec-2012 Southbank Centre: Royal Festival Hall | Jurowski's endgame: Grisey and Mahler with the LPO |
.jpg) The London Philharmonic Orchestra’s latest “only connect” programme was inspired by its allocated date – 12/12/12. An equivalent numerical repetition will not recur for another century. Furthermore the reversal of the first figure to 21 coincides with the day signalled by the Mayan calendar as a day of ending. In keeping with this apocalyptic vantage point, Gérard Grisey’s Quatre chants pour franchir le seuil (“Four Chants for Crossing the Threshold”, 1996–98) and Gustav Mahler’s Symphony no. 5 (1901–02) were paired to map a journey from the dark abyss into a bright awakening.Read full review... | |
| 27-Nov-2012 Southbank Centre: Royal Festival Hall | Strange meetings: Britten's War Requiem at the Southbank Centre |
 November continues to be a month of poppy art, despite Philip Larkin’s derisory account of “Wreath-rubbish in Whitehall”. As the only flower to survive the ravished soils of the trenches following the First World War, the poppy is replicated in the form of a paper badge to be worn yearly in commemoration of 11 November, the Armistice Day of 1918. It was deemed to be a symbol of hope and regeneration in the aftermath of devastating combat.Read full review... | |
| 4-Nov-2012 Guildhall School of Music and Drama, Music Hall | Knussen's magic toybox: Wigglesworth, Wood and Watkins at the Guildhall School |
 This month the BBC’s Total Immersion series celebrated the 60th birthday of British composer Oliver Knussen. A sensitively devised programme given at the Guildhall School of Music and Drama on Sunday featured five works composed between the 1970s and the 1990s. The collection comprised Knussen’s Autumnal for violin and piano (1976–77), written at the time of Benjamin Britten’s death, his Variations, Op. 24 for solo piano (1989), Secret Psalm for solo violin (1990, rev. 2003), Prayer Bell Sketch (1997) inspired by Tōru Takemitsu, and the aqueous Ophelia’s Last Dance for solo piano (2009–10).Read full review... | |
| 13-Oct-2012 St John's Smith Square | Everyman's Elgar: The Dream of Gerontius at St John's Smith Square |
.jpg) Certain images of Edward Elgar appear to be too heavily ingrained in our national consciousness ever to be shaken off. He has now been entombed as an establishment figure, a privilege for which he has the Last Night of the Proms to thank. Even works such as the Enigma Variations and the Cello Concerto that are less obviously redolent of patriotic bombast can be heard as expressive vehicles for Edwardian imperialism.Read full review... | |
| 11-Oct-2012 Royal Opera House: Linbury Studio Theatre | Maxwell Davies' The Lighthouse at the Linbury Studio Theatre |
 With its small raised platform and steeply seated audience, the Linbury Studio Theatre was an auspicious venue for the English Touring Opera’s production of Peter Maxwell Davies’ chamber opera The Lighthouse (1979). The trelliswork of metal bars encircling the stalls and the bleak lighting effects gave this performance a befittingly industrial air. Truncated by a curved wall, the stage effectively drew spectators into the claustrophobic world of this maritime signal tower as well as its wider aura of isolation.
Read full review... | |
| 8-Oct-2012 Southbank Centre: Purcell Room | Intrusions and inversions: Morton Feldman's For John Cage at Ether |
 The story of how composers Morton Feldman and John Cage met is now famous: in 1950, feeling dismayed by an audience’s discourteous reaction to Anton Webern’s Symphony, Op. 21 at a New York Philharmonic performance, Feldman decided to leave the concert. In the lobby he encountered Cage, who was there for the same reason. They quickly established a rapport and embarked on a friendship that was to influence their respective creative outputs.
Read full review... | |
| 1-Oct-2012 Kings Place: Hall Two | Tableaux vivants with notes inégales at Kings Place |
 “What is a score?” This was the question posed last night in Kings Place, Hall Two, by the effervescent ensemble who style themselves as notes inégales. Under the directorship of Peter Wiegold, six instrumentalists brought together a programme of improvisational works that responded to computer-generated scores on a large screen.Read full review... | |
| 29-Sep-2012 Kings Place: Hall One | London première of James MacMillan's Since it was the Day of Preparation... |
 The Kings Place programme booklet for Since it was the Day of Preparation… folds like a thin papery triptych. Yet, the composer’s photograph does not occupy the central panel. Indeed, gushing verbal bombast, a feature all too common in performances of new music, was pleasantly absent. James MacMillan’s programme notes were a minimal paragraph outlining the tripartite structure of his chamber work, which follows the narrative of Christ’s resurrection.Read full review... | |
| 20-Aug-2012 Cadogan Hall | Proms Chamber Music 6: Hugh Wood and Claude Debussy |
 This year the Proms Chamber Music Series returns to the bright and spacious environment of Cadogan Hall to celebrate the 150th anniversary of Claude Debussy’s birth. At the sixth concert in the series an inspired programme given by BBC Radio 3 New Generation Artists, the Escher Quartet, paired two works exactly one hundred years apart in their composition: String Quartet No.Read full review... | |
| 19-Aug-2012 Riverside Studios: Studio 2, Hammersmith | Anaïs Nin at Tête à Tête |
 Tête à Tête: The Opera Festival has once again succeeded in showcasing with flair some of the most daring and innovative small-scale operas. This Sunday, a diverse audience gathered at London’s Riverside Studios for the performance of Louis Andriessen’s recent monodrama Anaïs Nin (2009-10). There was a lively appetizer to each of the six main productions that day in the form of Lite Bites, a series of amusing micro-operas staged in the foyer area.Read full review... | |
