Darkness Visible: Âme x Lawrence Power review – violist and guests reimagine the concert for the digital age

Barbican, London
This ambitious and imaginative concert experience blended live and filmed performance. Not all its experiments felt successful, but at its best this was mesmerising

While the Southbank Centre marked its 75th anniversary this week with a Danny Boyle spectacular that managed to overlook the building’s six resident orchestras and classical raison d’être in favour of grime, techno and drum’n’bass, the Barbican quietly got on with the business of imagining a concert hall for the 21st century.

Darkness Visible – a collaboration between violist Lawrence Power and film director Jessie Rodger, who together are creative studio Âme, along with a host of starry musical friends – isn’t a flawless show. But as an experiment in thinking through sound, in testing digital limits and amplifying the live concert experience, it has a lot going for it: the start of a longer conversation about how we experience music in a multimedia, post-internet age.