✕ ✕
Turning tips into memories
Login
Signup

You have reached the limit of free articles.


To enjoy unlimited access to Culture Whisper sign up for FREE.
Find out more about Culture Whisper

Please fix the following input errors:

  • dummy

Each week, we send newsletters and communication featuring articles, our latest tickets invitations, and exclusive offers.

Occasional information about discounts, special offers and promotions.


OR
LOG IN

OR
  • LOG IN WITH FACEBOOK

Thanks for signing up to Culture Whisper.
Please check your inbox for a confirmation email and click the link to verify your account.



EXPLORE CULTURE WHISPER
✕ ✕
Turning tips into memories
Login
Signup

Please fix the following input errors:

  • dummy
Forgot your username or password?
Don't have an account? Sign Up

OR
  • LOG IN WITH FACEBOOK

If you click «Log in with Facebook» and are not a Culture Whisper user, you agree to our Terms & Conditions and to our Privacy Policy, which includes our Cookie Use

Support Us Login
  • Home
  • Going Out
    • Things to do
    • Food & Drink
    • Theatre
    • Visual Arts
    • Cinema
    • Kids
    • Festival
    • Gigs
    • Dance
    • Classical Music
    • Opera
    • Immersive
    • Talks
  • Staying In
    • TV
    • Books
    • Cook
    • Podcast
    • Design
    • Netflix
  • Life & Style
    • Beauty
    • Fashion
    • Gifting
    • Wellbeing
    • Lifestyle
    • Shopping
    • Jewellery
  • Explore
  • Shopping
  • CW SHOPS
  • Support Us
  • Get Started
  • Tickets
  • CW SHOPS
Get the Best of London Life, Culture and Style
By entering my email I agree to the CultureWhisper Privacy Policy (we won`t share data & you can unsubscribe anytime).
Classical Music

Total Immersion: Percussion

On 31 Jan 15, 7:30 PM – 10:00 PM

Wolfgang Rihm's gigantic Tutuguri receives its UK premiere in one of the avant-garde events of the year

By CW Contributor on 14/1/2015

Total Immersion: Percussion
Total Immersion: Percussion
Total Immersion: Percussion Total Immersion: Percussion Joe Lloyd
The UK premiere of Tutuguri - Wolfgang Rihm’s work for large orchestra, percussionists, taped chorus and speaker - promises to be one of the highlights of the season for the experimental concert-goer, and a central pillar of this year’s Total Immersion series. When even the Barbican’s own blurb describes this event as combining “scatological and anti-religious words... in a musical texture that ranges from hypnotic haze, to raw blasts of noise, to slow-motion Stravinsky”, you can be sure it’ll be memorable. Whether that’s for the right reasons, it’s harder to predict.
Wolfgang Rihm has a distinguished reputation on the European avant-garde scene, and has composed for most of the major festivals and opera houses. During his emergence on the musical scene in the 1970s, he was regarded as less revolutionary than the likes of Karlheinz Stockhausen, as his music holds vestiges of romantic and expressionist techniques of Mahler and Schoenberg. In our fragmented musical landscape, Rihm's a substantial figure, enormously respected for his prolific output across a wide range of genres and known for an engagingly immediate, historically allusive style of composition, free from the forbiddingly complex structures of his immediate predecessors.
This piece (first performed in Berlin in 1982, but only now scheduled in UK) is a two-hour ballet in two parts, inspired by the writings of radical French playwright Antonin Artaud. Diverse in style, with passages of delicacy and gentle beauty alongside blasts of recorded sound alongside all kinds of experimental textures and rhythms, its only unifying feature is a spirit of rebellion taken from Artaud.
The Total Immersion series attempts to win new audiences over to contemporary classical music by presenting uncompromisingly experimental works. Although critics have recently suggested that it has lost a sense of adventure - at 62, Rihm is one of the youngest composers in a programme dominated by the 90-year old Pierre Boulez - Tutuguri seems likely to restore its reputation for showcasing the outlandish. Book a place now, but beware: this will not be a soothing Saturday evening out.


What Total Immersion: Percussion
Where Barbican Centre, Silk Street, London, EC2Y 8DS | MAP
Nearest tube Barbican (underground)
When On 31 Jan 15, 7:30 PM – 10:00 PM
Price £10-34
Website Click here to book via the Barbican



Most popular

Things to do in London this weekend: 13 - 15 May. Photo: Poly Styrene: I Am a Cliche, showing as part of Village Screen Film Fest
Things to do in London this weekend: 13 - 15 May
London Theatre Guide: best plays on now in London (Photograph: Peter Lewicki)
London Theatre Guide: best plays on now in London, 2022
Our Time on Earth, Barbican
The best new exhibitions in London this month: May 2022
  • MORE CLASSICAL HIGHLIGHTS

  • What the critics say

    THE GUARDIAN

    “he's someone whose unstoppable musical creativity, whose tumult of pieces for orchestras, opera houses, string quartets, for the familiar forms of musical institutions, and for famous soloists such as Anne-Sophie Mutter, makes him one of the most approachable, engaging and profound composers writing music today.”

    Tom Service

    THE NEW YORK TIMES

    ‘The music [of Tutuguri] unfolds in charged, fitful stretches: clashing chords, orchestra blasts, riffs that start up and get stuck in place. Some passages are mystical and harmonically hazy. One long episode was like a Germanic, heavy-footed evocation of Stravinsky’s “Rite of Spring.”’

    Anthony Tommasini

Sign up to CW’s newsletter
By entering my email I agree to the CultureWhisper Privacy Policy (we won`t share data & you can unsubscribe anytime).

You might like

  • Minimalism Unwrapped

    Minimalism Unwrapped

  • Eotvos

    Boulez at 90: LSO and Peter Eötvös

  • Boulez at 90: Ensemble InterContemporain

    Boulez at 90: Ensemble InterContemporain

  • Pierre Boulez, a towering figure in contemporary music (Credit: Ingpen and Williams Ltd.)

    Total Immersion: Boulez at 90, Barbican Hall



  • The Culture Whisper team
  • Support Us
  • Tickets
  • Contact us
  • Press
  • FAQ
  • Privacy
  • Terms and conditions
  • Cookies
  • Discover
  • Venues
  • Restaurants
  • Stations
  • Boroughs
Sign up to CW’s newsletter
By entering my email I agree to the CultureWhisper Privacy Policy (we won`t share data & you can unsubscribe anytime).
×