Monday 11 March 2013

April at the Barbican

There is a lot to see and hear during April in the Barbican. The month sees residencies from English National Opera and Juan-Diego Florez, plus Sir Colin Davis conducting the LSO in Britten's Turn of the Screw. The LSO also celebrate their Panufnik Young Composers in LSO Futures Week. Whilst Sir John Eliot Gardiner celebrates his 70th birthday by conducting Stravinsky.

English National Opera are giving the premiere of Sunken Garden by the Dutch composer Michael van der Aa, who won the 2013 Grawenmeyer Award for his multi-media work Up Close. Sunken Garden is described as a multi-layered mystery opera which will be using 3D film with the production. The work is a collaboration between Michael van der Aa and novelist David Mitchell. (12-20 April)

April also sees LSO's Futures Week in which the orchestra celebrates the work of young and emerging composers, centred on the composers on the LSO's Panufnik Young Composers scheme which was set up in memory of Andrzej Panufnik. The centre piece of Futures Week will be the world premier of Panufnik Variations, a project which brings together graduates from across the Panufnik scheme's seven year history.  There are workshops, performances of music by Tansy Davies, Varese's Ionisations, new work from Jason Yarde culminating in the Panufnik Variations. (9 - 13 April).

The LSO under Sir Colin Davis are also giving concert performances of Benjamin Britten's The Turn of the Screw with Sally Matthews as the Governess, Andrew Kennedy as Peter Quint and Catherine Wyn-Rogers as Mrs Grose (16, 18 April).

The BBC Symphony Orchestra's Tippett series continues with his Symphony No. 3, conducted by Martin Brabbins, with Beethoven's Violin Concerto with Nicola Benedetti and the London premiere of Mark Simpson's A mirror-fragment (19 April)

Juan-Diego Florez is in residence at the Barbican, and performs in concert with Joyce DiDonato and the LSO in a programme of Rossini, Meyerbeer,  Donizetti, Delibes, Gounod, Bellini and Verdi. Florez will also be giving a recital with piano. (21, 24 April).

Sir John Eliot Gardiner is celebrating his 70th birthday in style with a programme of Stravinsky, Apollon musagete and Oedipus Rex, with Jennifer Johnston, Stuart Skelton, Gidon Saks and the London Symphony Orchestra. (25 April)

Crouch End Festival Chorus are giving another performance of Jams McCarthy's 17 Days,  based on the story of the Chilean mining accident. They are performing the work alongside Carl Orff's Carmina Burana in the composer's more dramatically intense version for piano duet and percussion. I sang the work in this version under one of Orff's pupils, who claimed that Orff had always preferred this version to the more colourful version for full orchestra. 

Elsewhere on this blog:

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