Wayne McGregor & Random International’s No One Is An Island Dance Performance

We checked out choreographer Wayne McGregor’s & art group Random International’s collaboration No One Is An Island today. The dance performance simply blew us away. Superblue and BMW are presenting this brilliant show. MEET FIFTEEN POINTS/II The 12-minute show explores the interaction between humans and machines. It involves two dancers and one robotic machine or kinetic sculpture called Fifteen Points/II on a track of about 20-metre long rails with 15 stick-like arms that each have very strong lights at the end. It can move forward and backward on the rails and move its arms with the lights up and down, forward and backward.   INPUT FROM HARVARD The ideas for the machine were developed by Random International during various artist residences, including one at the Harvard School of Engineering and Applied Sciences.   A MACHINE WITH SOME HUMAN FEATURES Many of the moves of the machine feel almost human-like. This […]

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London Never Dies at the London Cabaret Club – Great Show!

Last Friday, after my day of flyboarding and being stuck on South Western trains, I changed into my tux. Then Ms B & I checked out London Never Dies at the London Cabaret Club. The Club had offered us free Gold tickets to this Bond-themed show. Silver, Gold, Diamond, and Royal Gold tickets are the lowest category that include a full meal and they normally go for £90 per person. A rather reasonable price in our view for a three-course dinner and a show on the weekend in central London. Ticket prices range from £50 to £165.   No Slipknot or Slayer Ellie has always loved everything that involves nights out with music and dance, no matter if opera, ballet, musicals, or cabaret, so she was understandably super-excited to get to see this acclaimed show. I on the other hand don’t mind a bit of music, preferably heavy metal.   […]

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Dudamel’s LA Phil perform Norman’s Sustain at the Barbican… oh.. and they played Bruckner too

Ms B & I have just returned from one of the most noteworthy but ambiguous symphony concerts we’ve seen this year. An absolutely mind-blowing, era-defining first part, and a hugely disappointing, misplaced, misdirected main part. We’ve been huge fans of Dudamel for many years (and have blogged about him before), to us he feels like the Jimi Hendrix of classical music. His directing can turn a pretty decent piece by one of the geniuses of centuries bygone into an absolutely genius work. We also like the fact that he’s a political activist and very active with his youth orchestra and plenty of other projects. The LA Phil’s three-day residency at the Barbican closed tonight with Bruckner’s Fourth Symphony, preceded by the European premiere of Sustain by Andrew Norman. Sustain, roughly 40mins long, was commissioned by the orchestra to celebrate their centenary last year, and clearly to do so was the […]

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Preview of Rattle and LSO performing Stockhausen at Tate Modern

We’ve just returned from our visit to the preview of Sir Simon Rattle and the London Symphony Orchestra performing Stockhausen at the Tate Modern, and what a treat it was! The evening (of only 50mins performance; 60mins in total) started with Olivier Messiaen’s 1964 Et exspecto resurrectionem mortuorum (And I await the resurrection of the dead), a piece for brass, winds and percussion. Perhaps the most memorable bit about this part was how one of the musicians (no instruments/names mentioned; anyone present tonight would know who I’m talking about) thoroughly got it wrong big time, and – much more impressively – how the great maestro, Sir Simon Rattle walked up to the person in question at the end of the piece, and gently, smilingly, warmly, and clearly trying to suppress a burst of incredulous laughter, asked “What happened?”, to which the perpetrator said “I don’t know”. The world’s most famous […]

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Kaboom – Sir Simon Rattle and the Berlin Philharmonic at the Southbank Centre: Brahms

We’ve just returned from one of the two London concerts of Sir Simon Rattle’s final tour as the Berlin Philharmonic’s chief conductor. The evening was designed to showcase his time and achievements with his orchestra of the past 16 years (he has taken over the London Symphony Orchestra earlier this year and kept two hats on until now). Known for his love of and expertise with modern pieces, Rattle started the evening with the UK premiere of a piece by the famous, only 44 years old, Munich-born (like me!!), Berlin-based, German composer-clarinettist Jörg Widmann: ‘Tanz auf dem Vulkan‘ (Dance on the volcano), which had been commissioned by the BPO to mark Sir Simon’s departure, and only had its world premiere in Berlin three days earlier. Over the years, the conductor and the composer had collaborated on various occasions. Widmann is known for his wit in how he composes, everything is […]

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