Sex and Death at Covent Garden

Charlie Barber’s latest work, Sex And Death At Covent Garden, is a stunning event. Performed in Cardiff’s National Museum of Wales among homoerotic marble sculptures and white-jacketed Canton trendies, it’s reminiscent of those Sixties happenings where the audience was an integral part of the performance.

The video of the Queen’s recent birthday visit to Covent Garden is intercut with scenes of the arrival by tube of a busker. The orchestra, starting with 10 bars from Gluck’s Orfeo, disperses and reassembles at different points. A scruffy attendant turns out to be Lol Coxhill who plays and amazing sax solo and appears on another video about learning the instrument… An exhibition includes Jean Cocteau’s cartoon of Nijinsky, claimed as the starting point for the work, and other material from the musical score to a selection of postcards exchanged by the collaborators over the past two years.

Such dressing could easily obscure the event itself, and especially the music which is marvelously sonorous, arranged with the skill that is always apparent in Barber’s work.

But as an event it is more than a 50-minute composition and set out to challenge the elitism of art products criticized in Lynn MacRitchie’s original article from which the title is taken; hence the irony in setting it in a temple of high art and offering it to a trendy audience of aficionados.

The Guardian

Charlie Barber’s Sex and Death at Covent Garden intriguingly called ‘an orchestral installation’, is basically an extended composition for chamber orchestra, whose members are ‘constantly re-distributed, splitting into mobile groups to create a wide range of spatial effects’.

Sections of the piece came from the heavens, in the gallery of the museum’s high rotunda, other parts from the widely distanced staircases at either end of the hall, and from other more obscure parts, all in the tradition of the spatial antiphony of

Gabrieli at St Marks.

Performance magazine