Press room

The Barbican today announces three new concerts in its 2023 music programme, with full details below.

• Senegalese singer and guitarist Baaba Maal
• Producer, composer and electronic musician Matthew Herbert with the London Contemporary Orchestra
• Composer and filmmaker Christina Vantzou and ensemble, with extended-technique vocalist, composer and performance artist Holland Andrews.

Baaba Maal

The Barbican today announces a concert with singer, guitarist, traveller, ambassador, dancer, philosopher, humanitarian and activist Baaba Maal for May 2023.

Baaba Maal will be performing tracks from his latest album, Being – a jubilant and urgent record that confronts troubled times with messages of hope, warning and peace. The album and performance will be a euphoric celebration and reinvention of tradition featuring songs that cover dirty desert blues, intangible electro-spirituals, uplifting chants and trance-like freak outs. There are also exciting collaborations with The Very Best’s singer Esau Mwamwaya, emerging singer Rougi and Senegalese rapper General Paco Lenol.

Baaba Maal was not born into the traditional caste for singers and poets, the Griot caste, but would defy strict West African cultural expectation to become a musician. Inspired by indigenous African music and the American R&B, soul, jazz, reggae and blues it directly influenced, he moved from the northern town of Podor to Senegal’s capital Dakar in the 1970s. There he joined the 70-piece orchestra Asly Fouta and performed with his mentor and friend, guitarist Mansour Seck. He developed a highly distinctive sound radically fusing traditional African instruments and rhythms with an increasingly adventurous electronic approach that has led to numerous records and international acclaim.

“I go to wherever music is, to what music is calling me” - Baaba Maal

Tickets on-sale to Members and Patrons Wed 7 Dec 2022

General on-sale Fri 9 Dec 2022

Produced by the Barbican

Find out more

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The Horse

Matthew Herbert x London Contemporary Orchestra

Visionary producer, composer and electronic musician Matthew Herbert returns to the Barbican with The Horse: a unique live show performed with a horse skeleton alongside the London Contemporary Orchestra and a host of special guests.

Journeying from the very beginnings of music through to modern electronics and sampling, The Horse (released as an album on Modern Recordings/BMG in June 2023) will include  instruments made from the bones of a full size racehorse combined with samples of audio from various horses' lives and the traditional instruments of the LCO. The album also features performances by Shabaka Hutchings, Evan Parker, Danilo Perez, Seb Rochford, Theon Cross and others.

The show has been developed by Herbert in collaboration with Imogen Knight (Choreographer and Somatic Movement practitioner) and Kirsty Housley (Theatre-maker, Director and Dramaturg) and is as much a physical, theatrical evening as a musical one.  As the rhythms rise throughout the show, Herbert and some very special collaborators will attempt to bring the horse back to life through music.

Matthew Herbert is a multi-award winning composer, producer and writer. His range of innovative works extends from numerous albums to film scores for Oscar-winning movies as well as music for nightclubs, the theatre, Broadway, TV, games, radio, opera and installations. He is most known for turning ordinary sound into electronic music.

Tickets on-sale to Members and Patrons Wed 7 Dec 2022

General on-sale Fri 9 Dec 2022

Produced by the Barbican

Find out more

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Christina Vantzou and ensemble

+ Holland Andrews

Composer Christina Vantzou brings a performance of work from her

new album No. 5 (released 11 Nov 2022 on Kranky) to the Barbican in March 2023.

Following a “moment of focus” on the island of Syros in the Aegean Sea, Vantzou, who is Kansas City born and of Greek descent, crafted an amassed collection of raw recordings into No.5. Relocating to the Cycladic island of Ano Koufonisi, Vantzou worked with laptop and headphones on a patio, taking breaks to swim, slowly shaping the album from source material into lyrical movements born of the environment around her.  Alternating between austere and adorned, the movements span glottal groaning, cavernous water, glittering eddies of modular synth and languorous silences. With fleeting configurations of acoustic and electronic instruments intertwined with field recordings; Vantzou describes the pieces as “spaces as much as compositions”.

Having intimately created No. 5, Vantzou describes it as “almost like a

first album”, and she will bring pieces from it to the Barbican alongside an equally intimate ensemble of Lieselot De Wilde (voice), Ben Bertrand (bass clarinet) and John Also Bennett (piano, synth, bass flute). Support for the performance will be from composer and performer Holland Andrews who will also join Vantzou’s ensemble for parts of their performance.

Christina Vantzou is a Brussels-based composer who deals with time expansion,
atmospheres, and harmonies, and the affects and feelings that arise from them with
electronics and acoustic instruments. Holland Andrews (they/them) is an extended-technique vocalist, composer, and performance artist.

Tickets on-sale to Members and Patrons Wed 7 Dec 2022

General on-sale Fri 9 Dec 2022

Produced by the Barbican

Find out more