Like a flash mob they came at 24 hours’ notice to hear Daniel Barenboim at Tate Modern, celebrating 60 years of public performance – and incidentally promoting three new releases from Universal Classics – says Barry Millington in The London Evening Standard.
On the Bridge and round the Gallery of the Turbine Hall sat or stood the lucky holders of free tickets (8,000 people applied for just 400 tickets), while the proceedings were transmitted via a big screen to over a thousand more in the hall below.
Barenboim had brought with him a string quintet from the Berlin Staatskapelle, with whom he played an arrangement of the slow movement of Chopin’s E minor Piano Concerto. For the rest he charmed and mesmerised his audience at this hour-long concert with a series of solo works – a Nocturne, a Waltz and the Barcarolle – each charged with the highly subjective emotional intensity, sonorous tone and poetic insight Barenboim brings to bear these days.
Graham Spicer is a writer, director and photographer in Milan, blogging (under the name ‘Gramilano’) about dance, opera, music and photography for people “who are a bit like me and like some of the things I like”. He was a regular columnist for Opera Now magazine and wrote for the BBC until transferring to Italy.
His scribblings have appeared in various publications from Woman’s Weekly to Gay Times, and he wrote the ‘Danza in Italia’ column for Dancing Times magazine.
