Live, Video: Kritiken zu klassischen Konzerten, Opern, Ballett und Tanz finden | Kings Place: Hall Two

The Ligeti Quartet’s performance of Terry Riley’s works showcase technical mastery and creative interpretation, honouring Riley’s legacy while exploring their own unique approach to his compositions.

Engaging performances, including two world premieres, are served up by one of Kings Place's partners in the ‘Scotland Unwrapped’ season. 

A “Sound Unwrapped” programme, featuring Aurora Orchestra's trimmed line-up of five musicians and one sound engineer on electronics, proves to be an absolute success. 

An adventurous and unusual end to Kings Place's Time Unwrapped series and some striking collaborations with Aurora Orchestra.

The unlikely pairing of jazz and Baroque makes complete sense under the baton of Sam Poppleton. 

The current state of contemporary classical composition is a bit muddled. There are a wide variety of styles and approaches out there, and no consensus on where the cutting edge is to be found. Ensembles dedicated to performing new music must find a way to make sense of it all.

Counterpoise offered a tasteful and well-crafted concert at Kings Place on Sunday of recent works accompanied by film and still photographs. The unusual instrumentation of the ensemble (violin, saxophone, trumpet, piano) was surprisingly effective. Works for smaller subsets of the ensemble gave individual performers a chance to shine as well.

There’s something strange about applauding at the end of very quiet music: it is counterintuitive to make more noise clapping than the performers made during the actual performance. But the appreciative Kings Place crowd in Hall Two knew the drill, and this concert of “Some Recent Silences”, as it was billed, proved justly popular.

Kings Place’s Out Hear series of contemporary music is second to none in London, but these concerts – though never less than interesting – can also be strangely low-key. In a lot of ways, this Wednesday’s Out Hear concert, the last this season, was quite a big deal: a rare visit to London from leading contemporary ensemble Klangforum Wien, containing a world première.

Sixteen minutes of mercilessly pummelling the piano keys, alternating shimmering, dissonant chords between right and left hands, as fast as humanly possible or maybe slightly faster. This fleet, beguiling whoosh of texture left the Kings Place audience in no doubt as to Bruce Brubaker’s technical prowess, nor his astonishingly delicate, sensitive touch at the keyboard.

International Contemporary Ensemble’s debut London concert was a small-scale affair, tucked away in Hall 2 of Kings Place on a Sunday afternoon. But this talented group still gave us a great taste of why they’re such big news in the United States, with a pleasantly varied programme of new and recent music curated for them by Londoner and long-time collaborator Dai Fujikura.

It seems an unlikely concert title: Bach and electronic improvisations, but that is exactly what the unassuming Pekka Kuusisto informed us we were going to be experiencing at Kings Place on Monday night.

Of the two major composers to have had anniversaries in 2012, maybe it’s ironic that it has been the 150-year-old Claude Debussy, rather than the 100-year-old John Cage, who has largely been celebrated with silence.

“What is a score?” This was the question posed last night in Kings Place, Hall Two, by the effervescent ensemble who style themselves as notes inégales. Under the directorship of Peter Wiegold, six instrumentalists brought together a programme of improvisational works that responded to computer-generated scores on a large screen.

They say you should never meet your heroes. But they don’t say anything about them meeting each other, so I had very little idea of what to expect at Kings Place on Monday night when comedian Stewart Lee performed John Cage. In the event, this was a hugely enjoyable short recital, though I do wonder if it wasn’t a bit funnier than should really be expected from a Cage gig.

When Stravinsky brought his radical ballet Petrushka to Vienna in 1912, the composer recounts in his autobiography, the orchestra was full of complaints about the demands of the score. Disillusioned by this, Stravinsky found comfort from the unlikely figure of the man who raised and lowered the stage curtains. “Don’t let’s be downhearted”, he said, “I’ve been here for 55 years...

Similarities between Johann Sebastian Bach and John Cage don't exactly leap out at you. Both have an interest in numbers, it's true: Bach's music is obsessively, perhaps mathematically patterned, and Cage proportioned much of his music according to strict ratios and numerical schemes. But even this similarity is very much an abstract one: can you hear it in the pieces? No, not really.

Aisha Orazbayeva rests her violin under her chin as the welcoming applause subsides. She raises her bow and nonchalantly touches the screw at its tip against one of the strings, making an extremely quiet 'ting'. I, probably along with a good percentage of the Kings Place audience, am unsure as to whether or not the concert has started.It has done.

In a pre-performance discussion, the vocal ensemble Exaudi's director James Weeks promised us that they were not just going to stand in a line for their Kings Place performance. And they were true to his word; the singers performed from all parts of the intimate Hall Two and created an immersive, involved listening experience.

This Monday, the percussion quartet ensemblebash played the first of three concerts which they are scheduled to play this year at Kings Place in celebration of their twentieth anniversary. Over their twenty years, ensemblebash have come to be known as one of the most inventive and talented percussion groups worldwide. And they have just about earned the right to whatever typography they want.

It was clear from the start of this Monday’s ‘Out Hear’ concert at Kings Place that we were in for an intense performance. The stage was bare and the lighting was down. Christophe Desjardins’ recital of partitas by J.S. Bach and Philippe Manoury was a serious affair, as befitted a serious and intriguing selection of works.Manoury’s Partita I is for viola and live electronics.

It’s not every evening that you hear a composition played on two serrated Nigerian Fanta bottles. Nor is it every evening that you hear pieces by Schumann and David Byrne (formerly of Talking Heads) in the same concert. Nor, for that matter, do cellists often sing. As this concert’s title suggested, ‘Uncharted’ at Kings Place was very much a trip into the unknown.

Pushing the envelope on the traditional concert format, music group pianocircus performed dynamic works by composers Graham Fitkin and Colin Riley—including the world première of Riley’s Double Trio—in the concert Trilogies, inviting the audience to partake in the strange, yet beautiful world of contemporary classical music.