- Barbican Centre
- Robert Walker: In The Bleak Midwinter
- Amici Chorus
- Alex Pratley
- Arlene Cleary
- Kees van Baaren
- Mike Block: Step Into the Void
- Souvenirs de Montsalvat
Rhythms of the Brain
Performance news from Iceland, New Zealand and Malta
Simon Ingram is a New Zealand-based artist, working to create a dialogue between art and technology, re-inventing painting as a contemporary practice for the digital age. Simon's music-to-painting digital technology visualises the unseen visceral forces shaping our experiences of art and life. This will be used in conjunction with the NZTrio and New Zealand composer Alex Taylor at the concert Rhythms of the Brain on Saturday 27 May 2023, 7pm at Auckland Art Gallery in New Zealand. As NZTrio - violinist Amalia Hall, cellist Ashley Brown and pianist Somi Kim - perform Taylor's new commission Asymptote, EEG headsets will capture their brainwaves and this data will then be expressed in a painting, created in real time.
Rhythms of the Brain: Alex Taylor (left) with NZTrio
Back from its recent UK tour, the Iceland Symphony Orchestra will be collaborating with Canadian soprano and conductor Barbara Hannigan for two concerts in June 2023. Iranian composer Golfram Khayam's short, improvisatory work I am not a tale to be told, based on a poem by contemporary Iranian poet Ahmad Shamlou, will receive its first performances in Iceland. It was written for Barbara Hannigan, following her performance at a solidarity concert with the women of Iran. The performances begin with Franz Joseph Haydn's Symphony No 96 in D, conducted by Hannigan, and they also include Gustav Mahler's Symphony No 4, 'The Heavenly Life Symphony', for which Barbara Hannigan will both conduct and sing the soprano part. The first concert is at the Iceland Symphony Orchestra's home - the Harpa concert hall in Reykjavík at 7.30pm on 15 June 2023. The second concert is at the Hof Cultural Center, Akureyri in the north of Iceland, at 7pm on 16 June 2023.
Barbara Hannigan conducting the Accademia Nazionale di Santa Cecilia in Rome. Photo © Musacchio & Ianniello
The opera Edith Cavell by Maltese composer Paolino Vassallo (1856-1923) has only been performed once, at the Royal Opera House in Valletta, Malta, in 1927. The opera is built around the historical British nurse Edith Cavell who, with a Belgian colleague, was executed in Brussels in 1915 for helping more than two hundred allied soldiers to escape German-occupied Belgium and reach neutral Holland. It's a prime example of the romantic idiom which Vassallo inherited from his teacher Jules Massenet in Paris. To mark the one-hundredth anniversary of Vassallo's death, Dario Salvi, who came across a copy of the score in a Norfolk library, will conduct a concert version of the opera at Pjazza Teatru Rjal, Valletta, Malta at 8.30pm on 17 June 2023. Vocal soloists Martina Bartolotti, Gina Galati, Jorge Pita Carreras, Louis Andrew Cassar, Joseph Lia and Albert Buttigieg join KorMalta and the Malta Philharmonic Orchestra for this rarity.
Posted 6 May 2023 by Keith Bramich
