Caroline Shaw's The Listeners arrives at the Barbican carrying 16 billion miles of conceptual baggage: the Golden Record, Carl Sagan's pale blue dot speech, Whitman, Tennyson, a 2017 poem about borders. That Shaw doesn't collapse under the weight of it is the achievement. That she doesn't fully escape it is the honest caveat. The piece opens and closes with a wordless lullaby, and mezzo-soprano Lotte Betts-Dean delivers it with the kind of haunting specificity that makes the surrounding architecture feel even more fragile. The spoken recordings — greetings in 55 languages via record player, Sagan via cassette — are staged with just enough theatricality to feel deliberate rather than gimmicky. Shaw's harmonies resist sentimentality even when they're simple, which is harder than it sounds when your subject is literally the whole of humanity floating through space. The electric piano substituting for the original harpsichord was a smart swap. It gives the London premiere its own character — a Tomorrow's World warmth that suits the audio hardware sitting conspicuously on stage. The baroque-style orchestral interlude conjuring interstellar velocity is the piece's most purely musical moment: Shaw letting the orchestra off the conceptual leash for a few bars, and the BBCSO delivering. The weakness is structural. At 35 minutes, styled as a miniature oratorio, The Listeners keeps arriving at places where it could expand and choosing not to. The movements feel like first drafts of something larger. Haydn conjured the void in six minutes at the start of The Creation — but Haydn then spent another two hours building on that void. Shaw's piece ends where Haydn's begins, and you feel the incompleteness not as boldness but as a slightly missed opportunity. The first half was strong on its own terms. Borys Lyatoshynsky's 1955 tone poem Grazhyna — a Ukrainian composer telling a 15th-century Lithuanian story in post-Romantic idiom — is exactly the kind of worthwhile discovery that concert programming should do more of. Randall Goosby's Barber Violin Concerto was rich and unsentimental, and his encore (Coleridge-Taylor Perkinson's Louisiana Blues Strut, evoking bluegrass and slide guitar) was the evening's most purely enjoyable three minutes. Conductor Dalia Stasevska held the whole program together without drawing attention to the seams.
