Hattie Butterworth hears the performance of Barber, Ravel and Henriëtte Bosmans at London’s Barbican Hall on 14 June 2026
Now in its fourth year, it’s fair to assume that Classical Pride at the Barbican is here to stay. Celebrating queer composers and performers, the week-long event’s final symphonic concert with the London Symphony Orchestra has been hit-and-miss across the years.
For 2026, its programme centred around the party-pleaser pillars of Barber’s Adagio for Strings and Ravel’s Boléro, following Michael Tilson Thomas’s puzzling, whizzy work Agnegram in a nod to the composer–conductor who died earlier this year.
Perhaps the concert’s most interesting addition was the UK premiere of Henriëtte Bosmans’s Cello Concerto no.2, ably performed by Laura van der Heijden. A Dutch, bisexual composer, Bosmans’s work was premiered by her partner, the cellist Frieda Belifante, who was also a prominent lesbian, and a member of the Dutch resistance during the Second World War.
Sadly, the story of this concerto is more interesting than its content. A declamatory solo entrance from the cello starts the work off, before it weaves around slow, exposed shifts and sustained high melodies. Van der Heijden gave this work all the excitement and fluency of her captivating playing, though sadly much of the material felt repetitive and contrived. Its final movement is perhaps the most successful exposition of Bosmans’s emotional writing, its lush harmonies led with a serviceable sense of direction by conductor Oliver Zeffman.
The ensuing Ravel and Barber were as expected, with the Barber garnering renewed respect for the LSO’s glistening string section, tightly controlled and allowing new nuances of colour to shine forth.
HATTIE BUTTERWORTH
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