Montero's Barbican Recital: Spanish Postcards Meet Beatles Improv
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- Gabriela Montero performed a Spanish-themed solo recital ("Iberia") at the Barbican, the second of her three-concert residency, featuring 250 years of repertoire by Domenico Scarlatti, Chopin, Liszt, Granados, Albéniz, and Mompou.
- The critic characterized the formal programme as staying at "postcard-Spain" level, with short pieces clustering around flamenco and bullfighting imagery, though Scarlatti's Keyboard Sonata in C sharp minor was praised for having "the precise radiance of a Zurbarán painting."
- Montero closed with three audience-requested improvisations, transforming ABBA's "Mamma Mia" into a "lushly modal rhapsody" and the Beatles' "Here Comes the Sun" first into an "earnest Purcellian number" and then a "swinging ragtime finale."
- The review notes Montero has spent her career reinstating improvisation on the concert platform—a practice it says largely disappeared from public performance since the era of Mozart, Liszt, Bach, Messiaen, and Boulez.
- Granados's Eight Valses Poéticos was the closest the formal programme came to "an off-road excursion," and the critic felt the technically impressive set still lacked a substantial centrepiece before the improvisation bonus arrived.
Why it matters: Montero's residency offers Barbican audiences something rare in the modern recital circuit: live, unrehearsed improvisation in front of a paying audience, a practice the review notes had largely vanished from concert platforms since the 19th century. Her willingness to take shouted pop requests—from a child demanding ABBA to a Beatles call-and-response—and reshape them into modal, Baroque, and ragtime forms on the spot makes the residency a distinctive interactive event in a genre that typically offers zero audience input.
