Tagged with 'Barbican Centre'

Experience the unique blend of jazz and classical music in Nikolai Kapustin's Concerto No. 4 for piano and orchestra, performed by Frank Dupree with the London Symphony Orchestra under Sir Antonio Pappano.

On 20 November Andrew Norman’s orchestral work, Sustain, will receive its European Premiere at the Barbican, London. The work will be performed by its commissioners, the Los Angeles Philharmonic and conductor, Gustavo Dudamel.

While the work was itself completed over the course of several months, Norman’s idea for Sustain had itself began with an extended period of conceptualisation and experimentation several years earlier. The new 40-minute work that results, marks a change of direction in Norman’s music that contrasts with the character of earlier works such as Play. Instead, Sustain draws on its audience to consider its place within time and space. The work is not quite cyclical but rather it spirals, repeating the same music ten times with each repetition unfurling much faster than the last.  

Andrew Norman – Sustain: how the Earth is holding and sustaining us

All the work I was doing with long spans of musical time and geologically-unfolding sonic processes was in many ways my attempt to place us, the listeners, in relation to things in nature which are unfathomably bigger and longer than we are. And if there is a sense of sadness or loss that permeates this music, it comes from the knowledge that we, at this critical moment in our history, are not doing enough to sustain the planet that sustains us, that we are not preparing our home for those who will inhabit it in the next hundred, thousand, or million years. – Andrew Norman

Preceding the upcoming performance of Sustain, the UK Premiere of Norman’s Sacred Geometry will be given by the BBC Symphony Orchestra in London on 19 November. Meanwhile, on 21 November audiences in Finland can hear Try in Lahti, performed by Sinfonia Lahti and conductor Dahlia Stasevska.

• Andrew Norman – profile


• Sustain – work details 


• Barbican Centre London

 

On 28 November, the European premiere of Gerald Barry’s new opera Alice’s Adventures Under Ground will be given in a concert performance with Britten Sinfonia conducted by Thomas Adès. The performance at London's Barbican Centre closely follows the world premiere in Los Angeles on 22 November with Adès conducting members of the Los Angeles Philharmonic. Both performances are sung by a distinguished cast led by Barbara Hannigan in the title role, with Allison Cook, Hilary Summers, Allan Clayton, Peter Tantsits, Mark Stone, and Joshua Bloom.

Barry’s previous opera The Importance of Being Earnest (2009-10) has been widely performed to sold-out audiences and is heralded as a masterpiece of modern opera. The similarly subversive Victorian classics of Lewis Carroll’s two beloved novels “Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland” and “Alice Through the Looking Glass” were, to Barry, an obvious choice for the subject of his next opera.

Alice's Adventures Under Ground by Gerald Barry - Down the rabbit hole

In the same manner as the books, Alice’s Adventures Under Ground begins with Alice falling down the rabbit hole. In the opera, this becomes an occasion for a masterclass in singing: as she falls, Alice competes with the orchestra for who can perform the best scales and arpeggios. Such vocal acrobatics have been written primarily for the deftly agile voice of Barbara Hannigan, with whom Barry has a longstanding collaboration. A second virtuosic masterclass occurs at the Red Queen’s croquet lawn. Barry explains his emphasis on virtuosic technique:

The book is very dramatic, and is an ideal vehicle for divas, male or female. It’s tremendous material for showing off – it takes these unbelievable things for granted, viewing them as normal. – Gerald Barry

In his vocal compositions Barry has often played with language, and Alice’s Adventures Under Ground is no exception. The composer wrote the libretto himself, cutting down to the very core of Carroll’s stories and making them even more surreal and funny. One of the best-known passages from Carroll’s Alice, the Jabberwocky, appears in no fewer than five languages. For Barry, the feverish linguistic whirlwind of Alice’s libretto reflects the original madness of Carroll’s texts. Barry also chose to use the book’s original title, rather than “Alice in Wonderland”, to mirror the slightly darker madness of the opera.

I love the original title as it combines light and dark and more truly reflects the white and black energy at the heart of the work. It is this careering between ecstatic nonsense and violence which has made the text timeless and grips generation after generation. – Gerald Barry

Alice’s Adventures Under Ground will receive its Irish premiere with Adès conducting the RTÉ Concert Orchestra in the New Music Dublin Festival on 4 March 2017. Further upcoming premieres for Barry include a new work for chorus and orchestra, Humiliated and Insulted, on 10 February 2017 with the RTÉ National Symphony Orchestra and Philharmonic Choir, and 5-6 May 2017 with Royal Scottish National Orchestra and Chorus.

• Gerald Barry — Pro­file


• Alice’s Adven­tures Under Ground — Details


• Bar­bi­can Hall