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New Moon is nothing if not an international advertisement for the hungry virtues of virginity and young people can’t get enough of it
The Twilight Saga: New Moon
Theatre
A smart, prickly and rewarding view of sexual and emotional confusion
Cock
Restaurants
Kitchen W8 is a bargain for this area, if such sophistication is what you crave
Kitchen W8
Too long and drawn out but very entertaining with excellent special effects
This is a peculiar play and does not work for me. Some of it is very funny but there are real flaws
Alex has a strong powerful voice and was faultless, she is far better now than she was on the X-Factor
London,
Barry Millington's rating
Reader rating
Website: www.barbican.org.uk
Email: info@london-concert-choir.org.uk
No composer writing a St John Passion today can be oblivious to the models of Bach, three centuries old though they may be.
James MacMillan, with his religious background, is certainly aware of that benevolent shadow. But his new St John Passion, receiving its world premiere under its dedicatee, Colin Davis, is at its most distinctive and original precisely where it departs from its exemplars.
Where Bach gives his narration to an Evangelist, MacMillan gives it to a semi-chorus which sweeps the story forward equally rapidly in a curious form of harmonised chant, with Semitic overtones.
Each of the nine choral movements ends with the main vocal group (the LSO Chorus in splendid voice) meditating or declaiming in Latin. There is only one solo voice, that of Christus, a strenuous part but one to which Christopher Maltman rose heroically, delivering the richly dramatic word-setting to fine effect. At key moments of Christ’s declamation, the orchestra explodes in a sunburst of sound — equivalent, perhaps, to the halo effect of the orchestrated recitatives in Bach’s Matthew Passion.
That is one of many striking moments in MacMillan’s work: another is the Gesualdo-like sublimity of the chorus that ends the first part, all the more compelling for its contrast with extended passages of strident fulmination.
MacMillan’s is an angry response to the Passion story, its oases of tranquillity and reflection few and far between. The LSO crackled vigorously under Davis, finding peace only in the sombre beauty of the final, elegiac instrumental section.
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