The Barbican’s effort to open up the art centre to a wider audience than just City workers and wealthy local residents makes a leap forward with a new exhibition in the Curve. The free gallery space that wraps around the back of the main concert hall, has become home to Differently Various, a lively show and series of workshops co-curated by a group of artists from Headway East London, a charity for people who have experienced brain injury.  

If you are going to see A Strange Loop, the new American musical trailing a Tony Award and a Pulitzer Prize that has arrived at the Barbican, here’s a checklist of topics to make sure you are on top of first: intersectionality, Harriet Tubman, Marcus Garvey, gospel plays, James Baldwin, the Chitlin’ Circuit, bell hooks, the back catalogue of Tyler Perry. Especially Tyler Perry.

Carrie Mae Weems is the first live black artist to have a solo show at New York’s Guggenheim Museum, yet she is hardly known here at all. So the Barbican’s retrospective is timely, especially since, at 70, Weems is making her best work yet.

Schubert gave us a winter’s journey for the 19^th century: a wandering lover brooding, remembering, fantasising, maybe even dying to the chilly accompanying churn of the hurdy-gurdy man. In Everest, composer Joby Talbot and librettist Gene Scheer recreate it for the 21^st.

A journey of the mind becomes as much one of the body. Love remains, along with memories and fantasies, but now the human beloved must share their place with something else: the mountain. Obsessive, deceptive, all-consuming desire takes vivid form in this powerful operatic debut.

Simon Rattle’s farewell season as music director of the London Symphony Orchestra has inscribed a sort of artistic memoir as he moves from one of his beloved blockbusters to another. Last night, he closed his account at the Barbican (though he will regularly return as “Conductor Emeritus”) with Messiaen’s mighty Turangalîla-Symphonie.

A standing ovation part-way through a concert is unusual. Conductor Jules Buckley gestures to the members of the BBC Symphony Orchestra and the BBC Symphony Chorus that they should rise. Beside Buckley, Father John Misty stands looking from the conductor to everyone else on the stage, to the audience. Seemingly, in the midst of this, he’s thrown.

Il Trionfo del Tempo e del Disinganno is the opposite of a jukebox musical. So fertile, so overflowing was the 22-year-old Handel’s musical imagination, that his very first oratorio, composed during his time in Rome, would become a chest full of music the composer returned to again and again, pilfering and self-plagiarising over the ensuing decades. All those hits from Rodelinda, from Agrippina, Partenope, Rinaldo: he wrote them here first.

“YOUR NEW ALBUM IS FUCKING DEADLY!” hollers a voice from the depths of a full house at the Barbican on Thursday night, the first date on the north Dublin band’s UK tour for their stunning new album, False Lankum.

There was a jolting eco-themed work onstage in London recently, but sadly A Play for the Living in a Time of Extinction, a Headlong company collaboration with director Katie Mitchell and a number of international producing houses, wasn’t it. 

There’s a moment in the opening stretch of Giles Terera’s The Meaning of Zong where you think the former Hamilton star has written a piece about slavery that’s in much the same idiom as the hit musical.