London Symphony Orchestra

1 Barbican Events Sep 2017 barbican.org.uk News 2–13 Instagrammers in Residence 2 Basquiat: Boom for Real 3–5 A New Beginning 6–8 Woyzeck in Winter 8–10 Welcome to Culture Mile 11–13 Listings 13–54 Art 13–17 Film 17–30 Classical Music 30–43 Contemporary Music 44–46 Theatre & Dance 47–49 Learning 50–54 Information 54–66 Explore 54 Booking 56 Calendar 59–66 2 News Instagrammers in Residence How do you see the Barbican? From the architecture of the towers and the hidden corners of the foyers to our installations and performances – there are so many angles to the Centre and so many different ways of experiencing it. Curious about how our visitors see the Barbican and the surrounding neighbourhood, we invited six Instagrammers to explore the Centre through their lenses. Armed with a smartphone and their own unique style, our Instagrammers took us on a variety of photographic journeys around the Barbican. Meet our Instagrammers: @tobishinobi @londonlivingdoll @justanotherdayin @mitna29 @thealexx09 @liamfarquhar Different Instagrammers, different photographs – what would the Barbican look like through your lens? Share your photos with us on Instagram @BarbicanCentre 3 Basquiat: Boom for Real Cultural historian Augustus Casely-Hayford discusses the explosive impact of Jean-Michel Basquiat ahead of our autumn exhibition. The clock ticks down, the flint sparks, the fuse burns short – the tart and fleeting tang of electricity on the tongue – and then … BOOM – Boom for real … In little more than a decade, Jean-Michel Basquiat triggered a series of intellectual and artistic explosions that reconfigured many of the creative spheres that he touched. Ripping through the late seventies and eighties, his prolific and thrilling output eviscerated orthodoxy, fusing the esoteric and the conventional. He sent waves of creative innovation accelerating across traditional culture until once cast-iron categories dissolved, until his own imagination detonated in a cataclysmic paroxysm that looked backward with such ferocity that it became the future. And Basquiat left behind a cultural arena that was transformed by his brief, but brilliant, presence. Although he died at 27, in his short life Basquiat made a telling contribution to the cultural world, helping to normalise a particular kind of challenge to the intellectual status quo. Graffiti artist, painter, poet, DJ, philosopher, musician – Basquiat took on creative disciplines with a sure-footed mastery and left each 4 altered. Ultimately however, they were fodder to further his greater project of dissecting the way that we perceive, categorise and give value. While he was recuperating after being hit by a car, his mother bought the young Basquiat a copy of Gray’s Anatomy. This Victorian exploration of the mechanics of the human body left him obsessed with ideas of dissection and reconfiguration. Throughout his career he nurtured a forensic interest in forcing us to think about how we might pull apart and remake intellectual disciplines. He looked at history as a cadaver that could be deconstructed and reanimated to suit us. Searching beyond traditional western sources of artistic inspiration, Basquiat found an alternative plane upon which to build his art, borrowing and refashioning punk, rap, ancient Egyptian history and traditional African art. From this other world he conjured a magnificent theatre of alternate possibilities, simultaneously beautiful and shocking, both thrillingly nascent and yet ancient. It beguiled with its flamboyant brilliance and stunned with its difference. This was perhaps his Grand Project, the forced reevaluation of worth, the reconsideration of the things that we might value and deem worthy of serious consideration. Basquiat understood value – he escaped homelessness to become an internationally acclaimed artist in a handful of years. Perhaps driven by memories of his difficult childhood, by a hope that those early years 5 would not define his adult life, he approached his career with a pathological application. Blessed with a defining talent, he rapidly found success, while the residual pain of childhood lingered as an important catalyst for his practice. He understood the tension between his race and his gift, he knew what his talent meant, what his Blackness, his Haitian, his Puerto Rican and once African ancestry could connote to the artworld, and how this ethnicity could be used to limit his progress – but he also knew how he might deploy his identity for optimum impact. These gifts made him attractive to many of the most interesting figures of the time, Andy Warhol, David Bowie and Blondie among many others. During his early years of success, Basquiat’s volcanic talent was more than a counterbalance to his demons, but those anxieties intensified until ultimately, like many of his contemporaries, he was consumed by his own ghosts. While there have been other artists who have reconfigured the creative metric of their time, few did so with the explosive style of Jean-Michel Basquiat. Basquiat: Boom for Real 21 Sep 2017–28 Jan 2018 See page 14 for details 6 A New Beginning Sir Simon Rattle’s first year as Music Director of the London Symphony Orchestra and Artist-in- Association with the Barbican and Guildhall School kicks off with This is Rattle, ten days of concerts and special events marking his appointment. When Sir Simon Rattle picks up the baton as Music Director of the London Symphony Orchestra, it will be with a flourish. This is Rattle comprises ten days of Berlioz and Stravinsky, of Elgar and Helen Grime, of new music and community projects designed to celebrate not just Rattle’s arrival at the LSO, but his place in a wider creative community. It’s going to be inspirational. But what then? Well, whatever is the opposite of settling into a routine. ‘I’ve been working with an extraordinary orchestra in Berlin for years, an orchestra that is very proud of its history and looks back,’ says Rattle. ‘I’m now working with an orchestra – the LSO – that has an extraordinary history but absolutely will not admit to the idea of looking back. They look forward. They say, “What’s next? What can we do that’s new?”’ Think of this opening festival not so much as a fanfare, but as a manifesto – or as Rattle puts it, in typical fashion, ‘a tapas bar of the type of things I have in mind.’ His first season is anchored by works that are 7 central to his musical life, but with a new orchestra and – crucially – a new audience, he’s placing each one in a fresh context. Rameau’s Les Boréades sits next to Schubert; Tippett’s The Rose Lake throws its reflections on Mahler; and Bartók’s Concerto for Orchestra is performed alongside the extraordinary, collaborative Genesis Suite created in wartime America by some of the world’s greatest musical exiles. The latter will be directed by the great musical communicator Gerard McBurney, further proof of Rattle’s commitment to expanding possibilities – ‘Another no-brainer. We have to nourish this art form from the ground up’ – and an example as to why Rattle is also Artist-in-Association at the Barbican and the Guildhall. Looking beyond the concert hall, 2018 holds the prospect of Stockhausen’s immersive sonic spectacular Gruppen in the Turbine Hall at Tate Modern. Ambitious? It’s just what Rattle does, and from now on, it’s what the LSO does, too. ‘The idea is that we find other spaces in this extraordinary city where we can do extraordinary things. I’m sure this is only the start,’ he says. ‘We want to play early music, and we want to play music written yesterday. We want to work in the theatre. We want to go across arts. We want to tackle these incredible masterpieces that were written after the Second World War, and we want to carry on bringing music to everybody.’ 8 This is Rattle 14–24 Sep See pages 31–43 for details Woyzeck in Winter Jenny Gilbert explores a new production by director Conall Morrison, who has combined two masterpieces of the early 19th century to form a remarkable piece of music theatre. The great works of music and drama, for all that we mentally file them away in sealed boxes, share connections that can still surprise us. Woyzeck in Winter is a fusion of two early 19th-century masterpieces whose similarities are uncanny. Woyzeck, the play by Georg Büchner, and Die Winterreise, the song cycle by Franz Schubert set to poems by Wilhelm Müller, were written within nine years of one another. Each was the seminal work of a troubled genius who died young. Each narrates the course of one man’s obsessive thoughts and his downward slide towards dissolution. The play is a collection of 24 scenes, the song cycle 24 songs. Placed side by side, playscript and lyrics could be said to be having a conversation. 9 The Dublin-based theatre director Conall Morrison has spent many years absorbing both works. Büchner’s play, which follows the struggles of a put-upon foot soldier in the German-Austrian army, ‘grabbed him by the throat’ with its energy, its vividness, its darkness. He came to Winterreise (Winter’s Journey) soon after, and the two works became a twin obsession, Morrison finding the parallels between them more and more intriguing. Subjecting the material to the workshop process (‘another way of saying we kicked it around’) convinced him that play and song cycle together could create a new entity, one that shed light all round. Woyzeck in Winter not only takes the bold step of removing Schubert’s songs from the traditional recital- room setting, but also, more controversially, it puts them in the mouths of actors. While aware that he risks being accused of disrespecting the art of lieder singing, Morrison contends that using non-classical voices along with a new English translation ‘unlocks a kind of rough honesty’ in the poetry.

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