Inventive and moving electronic experiments, plus April’s best classical and opera

8bit, Royal Opera House ★★★★☆

The Royal Opera House, having been in something of a dream these past 13 months, is suddenly wide awake. Last month it offered terrific productions of two classic pieces of left-wing music-theatre. Now comes something even bolder: a set of eight digital “experimental experiences”, freely available through the ROH’s media channels.

The eight films, all between four and 10 minutes long, are always inventive and technically slick, and some are also moving. As well as digital imagery they call on several traditional art forms, including opera. Well-known arias from Handel, Purcell and Tchaikovsky appear, as do fragments of classical music. Usually these are electronically transformed in a way that makes them almost unrecognisable, as in Dumbworld’s Fatal System Error. Here, mezzo-soprano Alexandra Lowe’s performance of the lament from Purcell’s Dido and Aeneas is disrupted by a creepily realistic simulacrum of pop-up ads and viruses, and her own performance is distorted by glitches. At the end the suicide of Dido becomes a digital death, as Lowe’s face decays into coloured pixels and the aria seems to disintegrate.

Opera also appears in Anna Morrissey’s All Together Alone, in which Royal Ballet dancers improvise in sharp, cross-cutting sequences to the most famous aria from Catalani’s La Wally. Their movements are pliant and mournful as long as the aria cleaves to its original form, but become hectic and club-like when the music is abruptly invaded by a dance beat. Dance crops up elsewhere too, including in Rakhi Singh’s tormented and puzzling Ffaall, filmed in the stairways and stalls of the ROH itself, and the more successful Over/Under Ground, where we watch a lone woman represented by singer Katherine Manley crossing Berlin streets and parks before venturing underground. Here she encounters her dancing alter ego or possibly lover, played by dancer Miriam Arnold, in the neon-lit and graffiti-infested subways.

Unsurprisingly, the pandemic itself is the topic of two of the pieces. In Heal You, directed by Katie Mitchell, the camera follows a day in the life of volunteer and ROH chorus member Amanda Baldwin at a Covid-19 vaccination centre. The poetic lines about healing that flash up on screen, together with the beautifully gentle music by Anna Meredith and the images of patients cheerfully rolling up their sleeves, evoke a touching sense of human solidarity and warmth.

The other pandemic piece, Patrick Eakin Young’s Among the Flowers, is much more complex in its form and imagery. It concerns a solitary woman, who, as the blurb puts it, is “overcome with loneliness, lamenting her fate. Before all hope is lost however, something breaks into her world to bring her out of it.” But the rapid-fire intrusion of brightly coloured birds and flowers into a grey blasted landscape is too abrupt and one-dimensional to stir the imagination.

These days, no new arts venture can be entirely free of burning issues such as immigration, colonialism and the environment. But fortunately the two that touch on these do so lightly, and are among the best of the bunch. Elayce Ismail’s Our Dark Side and the Moon is a gentle invitation to see the Moon as the goddess of ancient times rather than something to be colonised, while Akhila Krishnan’s Echoes at the Gate is a quietly moving meditation on the 12 million souls who passed through Ellis Island on their way to a new life in the USA, the grainy, worried faces in old photographs of immigrants accompanied by a Tchaikovsky aria. These are the “experimental experiences” that touch the mind and heart; the ones where the tech moves centre stage unsurprisingly fail to engage. Alienation is alienating, after all. Ivan Hewett

See the eight films of 8bit via the ROH’s media channels. Info at roh.org.uk

LSO/Benedetti, LSO St Luke’s ★★★☆☆

At a time when real life has been a pale and wretched shadow of itself, a concert that “takes it to the max” at every moment and gives us some emotional catharsis ought to be just what we need. Last night’s streamed concert from the London Symphony Orchestra and violinist Nicola Benedetti, recorded at LSO St Luke’s, promised exactly that. It ended with what may be the most emotionally intense symphony ever written, Tchaikovsky’s Symphony No 6 (Pathétique). And before that came the world premiere of the most intense violin concerto ever written – or, at least, that seemed to be the aspiration of composer Mark Simpson.

Of course Simpson, famed as the only person to win both the BBC Young Musician of the Year and the BBC Proms/Guardian Young Composer of the Year awards, hasn’t declared that aim out loud. But he’s well known for being impatient with what he feels is the snobbish over-refinement and emotional pallor of much contemporary music. His own musical language becomes more unashamedly and gorgeously direct, even filmic, every year. On the score of this new piece, he quotes Robert Browning’s line, “A man’s reach should exceed his grasp, or what’s a heaven for?”

That’s a fine sentiment, but Simpson’s piece isn’t wholly aspirational. Often he reaches for something well within his grasp, ie. the listener’s emotional jugular. He conjures an extraordinary sound-world, massive and shimmering at once, like the spray around a huge waterfall. His piece is ostensibly cast in a five-movement form, with a yearning introduction and a mad dance leading to a central slow movement and florid solo cadenza, capped finally by a hectic finale. But Simpson’s unstoppable flow can’t be confined in his own scheme. No sooner does he quieten the din and allow a potentially touching and well-shaped idea to emerge than things build yet again to another bell-ringing, ear-jangling climax.

The soloist Nicola Benedetti was taxed to the limit, not just in terms of difficulty but in stamina, too. She cheerfully admits that learning the piece almost defeated her, though you’d never guess from this performance, where her fingers and bow danced in a heroic battle against a huge orchestra for almost 40 minutes. I lost count of how many times the brass rose to an aspirational, heroic fanfare, with Benedetti struggling to be heard above the din and somehow succeeding. To begin with, the sheer energy held me in a vice-like grip. But by the 10th climax, or maybe the 20th, I rebelled. There comes a point at which unremitting emotionalism seems a form of coercion, an unwillingness to give the listener space to think or feel.

Tchaikovsky’s Pathétique Symphony, by comparison, seemed a model of artistic tact and balance. Yes, the conductor Gianandrea Noseda and the players together gave the frenzy of distress in the first movement and the despair of the last movement a huge – almost oppressive – weight. But what stayed in the mind were the quieter, more telling moments: the tenderly nostalgic clarinet solos of Chris Richards, for instance, and the swaying gracefulness of the second movement. Music doesn’t have to shout in order to move us. Ivan Hewett

Available via lso.org.uk until May 6, then via Marquee TV

Nash Ensemble, Wigmore Hall ★★★☆☆

Continuity and tradition may be the quietest of virtues, but they’re also nourishing, as any concert from the Nash Ensemble will demonstrate. Over the chamber-music group’s 56-year history, the personnel has changed, but their sound – warm and rounded and beautifully subtle – has stayed pleasurably the same. When it comes to contemporary music, too, the Nash has stayed loyal to a handful of composers, nurturing them throughout their careers. That’s quite an achievement in an era in which many groups prefer to chase the most fashionable names.

Unfortunately, it also has its problems, as demonstrated by this concert at the Wigmore Hall last night. The downside to the Nash’s approach can be a lack of surprise, and it wasn’t altogether avoided here. It wasn’t, at least, an issue with the first piece, Simon Holt’s Cloud Shadow. From the title, you might expect something drifting and melancholy, like Debussy’s Nuages. But Holt avoided the obvious with a series of abrupt and hard-edged statements, full of sudden scurryings and mysterious pauses. The oboe and clarinet seemed to shadow each other – sometimes closely, sometimes at a distance – before being shoved aside by an angry horn and piano. It was beautifully shaped.

After that, the evening settled into a quieter mood. The exceptions to this were Julian Anderson’s two Prayers for solo viola and solo violin. They were as much about wrestling with the Almighty as they were about soberly praying to Him, an impression magnified by the tremendous performances from violist Lawrence Power and violinist Benjamin Nabarro. The pieces were great vehicles for these performers, but more solid, in musical terms, was Birtwistle’s Duet for Eight Strings, an exercise in making two instruments seem as weighty and intricate as four.

The evening’s star, however, was soprano Claire Booth. At the beginning of Harrison Birtwistle’s Four Songs of Autumn, she had to launch off on a high note, pianissimo, with no support from the surrounding cloudy harmonies – the kind of thing a singer dreads, but she carried off beautifully, as she did everything else. The song, based on Japanese poems about the transience of nature, was as delicate as cobwebs, the four string players seeming to hint at notes rather than quite playing them. Colin Matthews’s Seascapes, another world premiere, was cast in an interestingly ambiguous, not-quite-pastoral idiom. It caught the feelings of its text, poems by Sidney Keyes that evoked surging seas and estuaries at night, while also being troubled by premonitions of calamity, or memories of history.

Compared to all that, the final piece, Mark-Anthony Turnage’s Owl Songs, seemed innocently straightforward. Turnage’s previous musical homages to his beloved mentor, Oliver Knussen, have been moving, but this one, which likened the much-missed conductor-composer to the wise owl, sometimes tipped from “affectionate” into “twee”. It didn’t help that the piece came at the end of a very long evening, constrained by an English mood of pastoral elegy and meditation. Where difficult new music is concerned, variety is key – and less is nearly always more. Ivan Hewett

Available via wigmore-hall.co.uk until May 27

London Philharmonic Orchestra, Southbank Centre ★★★★☆

After a year-long sleep, London’s major arts centres are showing signs of life. At the Southbank Centre in London, the resident orchestras are now broadcasting or streaming concerts on a regular basis. Among them is the London Philharmonic Orchestra, which last night pulled off the feat of fielding a foreign-based conductor and soloist. The Berlin-based Robin Ticciati, often dubbed the new Simon Rattle – even though unruly locks and great talent are all they have in common – was on the podium. Denis Kozhukhin, a Russian pianist now in his mid-30s, was at the piano for the opening work, Beethoven’s Piano Concerto No 5 (the Emperor).

“Mighty” is a word commonly applied to Beethoven’s last and biggest concerto, but “flamboyant” and even “flashy” are apt as well. Some pianists, such as Jean-Efflam Bavouzet, revel in the flamboyance; some, such as Jeremy Denk, undercut it in a clever way. Kozhukhin, a wonderfully intelligent performer of Mussorgsky and Grieg and Chopin, set to his task conscientiously. He flung himself into the grand opening passagework with a will, and certainly produced an impressive tone. In the final movement, he made sure we felt the invigorating rhythmic “kick” in the opening idea, though it didn’t have that playful ease that should make it soar. One had the impression of a great actor lavishing his art on a part that wasn’t always congenial to him.

Even so, that state can have a special expressive force of its own, and it certainly did here. There were other aspects of Beethoven’s concerto, too, such as the sudden shifts to dreamy far-away harmonies or the huge hymn-like melody of the slow movement, that suited Kozhukhin down to the ground. He was fortunate to be partnered by a super-alert orchestra and conductor. Ticciati and the orchestra gave time at significant turning points for Kozhukhin’s lyrical bent to flourish, and the pianist returned the compliment in the slow movement. When the woodwind players took their turn with the beautiful melody, Kozhukhin kept his eyes fixed on them, so his gentle gilding was moulded perfectly to their long arching line.

Then after barely time to take a breath, we were plunged into the severe granite-grey world of Sibelius’s Symphony No 7, a single-movement piece that packs more weight and mystery into one 20-minute span than many hour-long multi-movement symphonies. The transition from the grand opening section to the dancing music that follows is always a mysterious moment, but in this performance it was especially thrilling, as Ticciati delayed the change in tempo until later than usual. It gave the effect of a coiled spring being released, and subtly altered the dynamic and proportions of everything that came after.

This was the most telling example you could ask for of how a fine conductor can shed a whole new light on a piece. And because Ticciati paced everything so well he didn’t have to urge the violins to be superhumanly intense at the final climactic moment – the power of the all accumulated momentum achieved the same result, effortlessly. Ivan Hewett

See this concert free for seven days at lpo.org.uk

Royal Liverpool Philharmonic Orchestra, Philharmonic Hall ★★★☆☆

After 15 seasons, Russian-born conductor Vasily Petrenko is leaving the RLPO to take up a new chief conductor role in his home country, and at the Royal Philharmonic in London. His years at Liverpool were golden ones for the orchestra, and included much-praised recordings of the complete symphonies of Shostakovich, more recently the launch of a complete Mahler symphony cycle. That tells you where Petrenko’s strengths lie: conjuring up emotional worlds of extraordinary intensity shot through with irony and sarcasm.

So last night’s programme from the RLPO did not seem ideally suited to him. There were three pieces, all from that fascinating period of the early 19th century when the poise and grandeur of Haydn and Mozart’s classical style was disturbed by tremors of the coming romantic era. Music-lovers in Vienna in 1817 didn’t seem overly bothered by the tremors – what they were excited about was the high-jinks of Rossini’s comic operas, which were more fun and all the rage at that time. Schubert cashed in on the craze by writing a couple of overtures “in the Italian style”. Last night we heard the first of them.

It launched with a slow introduction which Petrenko made very spacious indeed, giving the RLPO wind players the space they needed to unfurl those melodic curlicues. That was one striking thing about this opening; the other was the excellent broadcast sound. Like most orchestras in the UK the RLPO has been learning the art of broadcasting concerts on the job, and now achieves a really good sound routinely, though the camerawork felt a bit unvaried. Once into the fast main section, the sound lost some definition. The strings didn’t quite have the needlepoint delicacy required.

Then came a piece where elfin lightness has to be added to precision, and is unforgiving of blemishes: Mendelssohn’s Midsummer Night’s Dream Overture. Here things came together better, and the middle section, where those romantic tremors can be felt coursing through the music, had a lovely sense of mystery. Proper Russian that he is, Petrenko feels the romanticism of this piece more than its classicism, and in the Nocturne he set a luxuriously slow tempo that allowed the horns’ sunset glow to burgeon. The final Scherzo had a tripping lightness but felt somewhat cautious, as if the midnight fairies were watching their feet rather than looking up at the stars.

Finally came Beethoven’s Second Symphony, a piece that in some performances can seem almost as grand and muscular as the famously muscular Third ‘Heroic’ symphony – as it did here. The opening slow section was massively spacious, and the ensuing fast section full of engaging pent-up energy. In the slow movement it was again the woodwind players who shone, giving striking, big, expressive swells to Beethoven’s still short, essentially classical phrases. The amazing slipping-on-banana-skin opening of the final movement was uproariously funny, as it should be. Not everyone has warmed to Petrenko’s hyper-intense conducting style, but there’s no doubt the RLPO’s new chief conductor Domingo Hindayan, who takes over in September, will be stepping into big shoes. IH

See this concert, and Vasily Petrenko's final concerts as chief conductor of the RLPO in July, at liverpoolphil.com

Peter Grimes, Teatro Real, Madrid ★★★★★

Big emotions, a massive orchestra, a huge cast and a large audience: this is what British opera-lovers have been yearning for. Deborah Warner’s new production of Peter Grimes, Benjamin Britten’s 1945 opera, conducted by Ivor Bolton with a British cast, seems like the perfect post-Covid comeback. There is just one catch: it’s happening in Madrid.

Covid numbers in the Spanish capital are worse than in London, and rising. But the Teatro Real reopened last May thanks to the company’s industrious efforts, matched by the liberalism of the local government. Not one job has been axed, not one salary cut. The house has its own team of scientists, has undergone a €1 million renovation, and has a new safety concept for each production. There hasn’t been a single recorded case of Covid transmission in the audience. In the midst of European panic, the Teatro Real feels like an island of sanity.

And of beauty, which Lord knows we need. The isolation of Grimes, his pent-up rage and loneliness, belong to us all. In a Suffolk coastal town, this fisherman is tormented by the demise of his previous apprentice at sea; the arrival of a new workhouse boy triggers a fatal downwards spiral. Grimes’s friends cannot save him, nor can his dreams of a big, redemptive catch. The villagers’ suspicion, hypocrisy and hysteria, paired with Grimes’s own ambition, lead ultimately to the new boy’s death. Who is culpable? The mob or the man?

Warner’s new production, which will go on to the Royal Opera, Covent Garden, is gut-wrenching. It plays, loosely, in today’s England; the director was inspired by Jawick, one of our poorest communities. We sentimentalise poverty, Warner believes, at our peril. Yet Michael Levine’s sets, in which boarded-up high-street windows form part of a variable backdrop, Luis Carvalho’s costumes, in muted shades of beige and ochre, and Peter Mumford’s subtle lighting are all aesthetically stylised.

The opening court scene, detailing the death of the previous apprentice, plays as Grimes’s dream. The apothecary Ned Keene has been reimagined as the local drug-dealer; when Grimes’s new apprentice arrives, mute and brutalised, he seems a mirror image of the fisherman’s inner child. Allan Clayton’s debut in the title role is a triumph: here is an outcast tormented by dreams of a redemption that will never come. He gives us raw honesty with consummate technique; he has all the right social awkwardness, and the poetry and rage. Clayton is a burly Heldentenor who can find effortless tenderness in his upper registers – the very best kind of Grimes.

The rest of the cast is formidable, too. Jacques Imbrailo’s Ned Keene is amorally seductive; Maria Bengtsson’s widow, Ellen Orford, has both world-weary strength and brittle fragility. Barnaby Rea’s carrier Hobson is a viciously charismatic ringleader. Christopher Purves makes a gentle, strong Captain Balstrode, the perfect counterfoil to Catherine Wyn-Rogers’s seen-it-all Auntie. The choir of the Teatro Real is as strong theatrically as it is vocally, as the villagers who drive Grimes to his death, but the real storms happen in the orchestra pit, where Ivor Bolton conjures up the sea’s many moods with impressive force and precision. The Spanish ocean is inevitably warmer than Suffolk’s icy waters, and the players imbue Britten’s flintiest lines with their own sensual warmth.

The Teatro Real plays at 65 per cent audience capacity, socially-distanced and wearing masks. Festively dressed, and rising to their feet for a standing ovation, the Madrid public offers a taste of how it will feel when this production arrives in the homes of its co-production partners, in London, Paris and Rome. Madrid’s experiment proves that we can, and should, have culture during the pandemic. The rest of the world must take note. Shirley Apthorp

Until May 10. Info: teatroreal.es

Hallé Orchestra, Bridgewater Hall, Manchester ★★★★☆

All too often, performing a new piece can seem like a duty reluctantly endured by an orchestra, rather than a pleasure to be embraced. This is one reason that this concert from the Hallé Orchestra, filmed two weeks ago at Bridgewater Hall and broadcast from yesterday, was such a joy. It climaxed with the world premiere of Symphony No 2 by Huw Watkins, and it was instantly clear that the players and (above all) conductor Mark Elder were relishing the experience.

The new piece was easy for the listener to relish, too. In three movements nicely poised between a symmetrical balance and an exuberant onward rush, the symphony glowed with vernal innocence; the sound of two dancing flutes and horn-calls evoked a very British Eden. Watkins is a fine pianist as well as a composer, and his music has that natural fluency that springs from brain and fingers being in constant touch. He’s not hamstrung by theory or abstruse constructional devices, but he was evidently keen to respect the idea that a symphony should be like an organism constantly burgeoning and sending out new shoots, and also constantly referring back to the seed that gave it birth – in this case, those two intertwining flutes.

Eden, chorales, distant horns, startling simple major chords… It all sounds very traditional, and there were moments, particularly in the second movement’s back-and-forth between spacious string chorale and glowing flute and harp, that briefly evoked mid-20th-century English music. Unlike composers of that era, however, Watkins doesn’t feel the need to doff his cap to the idea of “being modern” by infusing passages of sweatily dissonant, ear-bending counterpoint into his own harmonically radiant idiom. He wears his optimism on his sleeve – but because he has such an interesting musical mind, the optimism never seems facile.

Watkins’s symphony was the final sunburst in a concert that was full of radiant moments. It launched off with Debussy’s Prélude à l’après-midi d’un faune, a piece that Elder clearly loves. He gave every little melodic curlicue and sigh time to unfold, and coaxed a sound of tremulous, diaphanous beauty from the Hallé. It was unfailingly lovely, although it didn’t quite catch those moments in which the faun wakens from his erotic dreams and does a bit of real-life amorous pursuing.

After that came Rachmaninov’s Rhapsody on a Theme of Paganini, for solo piano and orchestra. It’s a set of 24 variations on Paganini’s famous Caprice No 24 for solo violin, but as the pianist Stephen Hough said in his pre-concert chat, it’s the immortal melody towards the end that people really want to hear. As if to disabuse them of the idea that only the big tune matters, Hough and the orchestra made the previous 17 variations seem maximally interesting and varied, with lots of pullings-back in tempo from Elder so that Hough could savour a particularly graceful or mock-demonic moment. When the big tune finally came, Hough made it seem almost throwaway, a move which shook the dust of habit off the moment and made it seem new. That’s artistry for you. Ivan Hewett

Available until July 15 at halle.co.uk

Seven Deadly Sins/Mahagonny Songspiel, Royal Opera House ★★★★★?

On Friday night, while many performances were cancelled following the death of Prince Philip, the Royal Opera House, went ahead with the streamed premiere of two satirical works by Bertolt Brecht and Kurt Weill.

While some might feel that the company’s decision was disrespectful, I think the ROH did the right thing. Not only did they offer an on-screen tribute and a minute’s silence, I reckon the Duke of Edinburgh, who was well-known for finding opera a tremendous bore, might have enjoyed the theatrical flair of these shows —and the hit songs.

For the rest of us, it’s a relief to discover there is still a creative heart beating at Covent Garden—and it’s the youngsters who are leading the way. This double-bill features seven current holders of the ROH’s Jette Parker Young Artists scheme, led by director Isabelle Kettle. First comes the ‘sung ballet’ The Seven Deadly Sins in which sisters Anna 1 and 2 roam from city to city, hoping to earn the money that will allow their family to build a house, and learning the hard way that it’s hard to be moral when you’re desperate. Then comes the Mahagonny Songspiel, a set of songs about a legendary pleasure city where all the pleasures turn out to be illusory, and the bewildered inhabitants learn they are in a sort of hell.

Both pieces are rich in ironic switchbacks, so my heart sank when I read Kettle had reimagined the first piece as a “timely comment on gender politics”, and that the two together “depict a crisis of femininity and a crisis of masculinity respectively”. Wouldn’t Brecht’s carefully crafted parables and Kettle’s imposition of an up-to-date, totally different agenda be like oil-and-water?

I needn’t have worried. Both pieces are carried off with such exhilarating theatrical panache and intelligence that the two agendas actually fuse and become one. In the first, Anna 2 played by dancer Jonadette Carpio becomes the perfect leather-clad, sinuous object of male fantasy to achieve her goal, but you can see the distress and self-disgust gathering in those gyrating limbs. Her sister, played by mezzo-soprano Stephanie Wake-Edwards, cocooned in a stage-within-a-stage kitted out like a theatrical dressing-room, comforts herself with binge-eating and looking at the property pages. Meanwhile the awful grasping Family, the 21st century version of Brecht’s moralising bourgeois (played superbly by Filipe Manu, Egor Zhuravski, Dominic Sedgewick and Blaise Malaba), lounge about complacently, pointing the finger at everyone but themselves.

In the Songspiel the action spills out into the stalls, where the seats have vanished to make way for a spoiled Eden of patchy grass. The Family of the preceding piece have become puffed-up specimens of male vanity, who under the sceptical gaze of Wake-Edwardes and mezzo-soprano Kseniia Nikolaieva collapse into shrivelled husks, literally shirtless and trouser-less.

All this stimulates the mind, but it touches the heart too because the singers and wonderful ROH orchestra under Michael Papadopoulos reveal the tender warmth beneath the brittle sarcasm of Weill’s score. Adding an extra touch of expressivity was dancer Thomasin Gülge?, especially in the Songspiel where his gyrations and mimings caught a sense of genuine human feeling throttled by sterile fantasies. If the evening has a star it’s him, but this is truly an ensemble evening everyone can be proud of. IH

See this double-bill via stream.roh.org.uk

Benjamin Grosvenor, Barbican ★★★★★

Britain’s very own piano wunderkind isn’t a natural talker, which can be a problem in an age when giving a loquacious interview seems to matter as much as actually performing. In the chat with fellow-pianist Lucy Parham shown after this streamed concert from the Barbican, Grosvenor came over as sweetly earnest but reluctant, as if protecting an inner core.

Which is just fine, because at the keyboard that core shines out with perfect lucidity. The sheer naturalness of Grosvenor’s playing gilds the experience of listening to him at every moment. One enjoys it the way one enjoys the sight of a dolphin swimming, or a master of Chinese calligraphy executing a character with three quick but perfect strokes.

His programme was not long in terms of clock-time – a mere 65 minutes – but it was musically huge, with Chopin’s third sonata and Ravel’s vastly taxing Gaspard de la Nuit separated by the three slight but charming folk-dances by Argentina’s national composer, Alberto Ginastera. At no point did Grosvenor give the impression of being stretched by the music’s demands, even at the delirious climax of Ravel’s Scarbo, when the hands leap back and forth across the entire length of the keyboard.

What makes Grosvenor’s aristocratic impassivity so piquant is the way it’s contradicted by the flickering sensitivity of his sound. The beginning of Chopin’s third sonata, in some pianist’s hands, is statuesque and noble; here it was hugely impetuous and fierce, which made the spaciousness of the later lyrical melody all the more telling. And it’s not as if nobility were lacking. It stole over the music towards the end of the movement, where it seemed like a quality hard-won from all the previous turmoil.

The glittery, coiled-spring opening of the second movement was a touch po-faced in its brilliance, but the contrasting slow section had a beautiful soft-edged poetry. In the third movement Grosvenor again played on contrasts, emphasising the bitter hauteur of the opening gesture so that the vast spaciousness of the slow ruminative section really stood out. At the opening of the fourth movement the surging melody was phrased so carefully it seemed almost pedantic but the payoff was that the overflow of passion at the close seemed immense.

What this showed was Grosvenor’s way of harnessing his perfect control of sound and texture to give a thrilling sense of things eventually spinning almost out of control – a quality he put to telling use in the first and third of Ginastera’s Three Argentinian Dances, which had a terrific jangling swagger. In Ravel’s Scarbo he discovered an astonishing range of colours between black and jet-black.

All this was wonderful. But in the end it’s Grosvenor’s limpid lyricism that makes his playing so treasurable. It was there in the opening piece, Liszt’s transcription of Schubert’s well-known Ave Maria, where our attention was poised between Liszt’s silvery ornamentation trickling down from above, and Schubert’s beautiful melody. It was there in the dreamy second movement from Ginastera’s dances. And it was there in Grosvenor’s encore piece, Saint-Sa?ns’s The Swan from Carnival of the Animals, in an arrangement by the great virtuoso pianist Leopold Godowsky. The well-known melody unfurled in perfect lucidity, the little curlicues of Godowsky’s ornamentation supporting it tenderly, like the putti around a Renaissance Madonna. IH

Daniel Barenboim and Martha Argerich, Festival Paques ★★★★☆?

Seventy-two years ago in Buenos Aires, the seven-year-old piano prodigy Daniel Barenboim would often meet with his equally prodigious (and slightly older) friend Martha Argerich in the house of a music-loving businessman, where (so Barenboim tells us) they would play together under the piano, as well as playing duets.

Now, after decades spent apart as stars in the musical firmament, on paths that rarely crossed, they’ve found each other again through the joys of playing piano duos. Last night they appeared together in a programme of old favourites at the Easter Festival in Aix-en-Provence.

The piano duo is an inherently cosy medium. Two people sit side-by-side, sharing not just a keyboard but the actual fabric of the music itself, one player’s hand obligingly taking over a melody when it goes too high or low for the other. But it seemed especially cosy here. When the camera panned to the two friends they were deep in amused conversation, but then noticing it was time to start, they plunged into Mozart’s great, late duo Sonata in C major. It was interesting to observe their different body languages as they played: Barenboim was fixed on the job in hand, glued to the keyboard and the notes, while Argerich often glanced around or at him with an amused or questioning look.

In this sonata, Mozart really luxuriates in the opportunities that four hands offer for brilliantly interwoven ribbons and sonorous masses of sound – and the players did too. They didn’t trouble to completely align their styles. When an arching phrase came along with an opportunity to lean expressively on certain notes or pull the tempo back a little, Barenboim (seated at the treble end of the piano) would do it his way, and when Argerich echoed the phrase down in the tenor region, she would do it her way (though, it must be said, Mozart’s brilliant phrases were more shiny and precise in her hands than his). I’ve heard more correct performances of the piece, but never one more free in tempo or more full of spontaneous enjoyment.

With Debussy’s Six Epigraphes Antiques, we moved into an imagined world of shepherd’s flutes, dancing girls playing hand-bells and dusty Egyptian tombs. The players were responsive to this, and together produced some deliciously evocative sonorities – too delicious, in fact, because what this piece needs is a simple approach and a steady tempo. The music’s dancing grace and sense of continuity were compromised.

With Bizet’s Jeux d’Enfants, however, everything came together. The little pictures of bourgeois Parisian children’s games – blowing soap-bubbles, galloping down the Bois de Boulogne, or tiptoeing uncertainly in Blind Man’s Buff – all came to life with affectionate, unbuttoned cheerfulness. Twice Argerich took over at the treble end as if to say “why should you have all the fun?” and at the end they both threw caution to the winds in a mad Galop. It was an uproarious end to a concert in which the human value of a long friendship and musical values were movingly intertwined. IH

The Easter Festival at Aix-en-Provence continues until April 11. Info: festivalpaques.com

Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment, Battersea Arts Centre ★★★★★

Despite the lockdown there have been quite a few streamed Passions to choose from over Holy Week, from UK venues and from overseas, many with starry casts.

It was a difficult choice but in the end I plumped for the Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment’s performance of Bach’s St John Passion, the most dramatically urgent of Bach’s two well-known retellings of the story of Christ’s Arrest, Trial and Crucifixion. It was filmed in Battersea Arts Centre, in a strikingly tatty space with peeling unplastered walls – a deliberate choice, one imagines, to add to the feeling that this world-shattering drama takes place amidst human dirt and suffering. The performance however was pure gold.

What made it so was the power and expressivity of the singing. That isn’t always the case. I can recall performances where the singers were those pitch-perfect, pretty but somewhat bland voices one hears all too often in “early music”, and it was the dancing sound of the two flutes or the plangently sad oboes that lingered in the memory. Those things were certainly wonderful here. The whole band was on top form, but I have to mention Rodolfo Richter and Huw Daniel, the two viola d’amore players. Their reedy, pleading sound wrapped the voice of Gerald Finley in a gentle embrace in the famous “Betrachte meine Seele” (Look, my Soul) aria.

As for the singers there were just thirteen, nearly all of whom stepped forward to take a solo role at some point before retreating modestly back into the collective. Gerald Finley as Christ was more the suffering human being than the solemn, lofty figure we often hear, but that didn’t stop his actual singing from being as exquisitely moulded as ever. He didn’t overshadow the others, who were uniformly wonderful. Helen Charlston took the most tragic aria of the piece Es ist Vollbracht (It is Finished) at a daringly slow pace, but thanks to her thrilling intense tone and expressive moulding of the line it paid off. The equally young and fresh-faced tenor Hugo Hymas was so gracefully expressive in Erw?ge (Behold) you could actually forget just how excruciatingly unvocal Bach’s music is.

Really I could praise them all, but I must leave space for South African actor Nakhane, whose eloquent readings from the Bible and TS Eliot added still more depth to the occasion, and tenor Mark Padmore. He gave the role of Narrator an infinite, suffering patience, never once giving way to fury at the injustice of the Trial scene as some Narrators do. And he acted as musical director of the performance with the lightest touch. Some might have wished for a more exciting Trial Scene, and a sharper sound in the “Kreuzige!” (Crucify Him!) chorus. For me the feeling of tender sympathy and forgiveness Padmore's interpretation shed on the piece was infinitely moving. If ever a musical performance caught the spirit of the phrase tout comprendre c’est tout pardonner – to understand all is to forgive all – this was it. IH

Watch this concert at oae.co.uk or marquee.tv

The Gesualdo Six, Kings Place ★★★★☆?

Lockdown may have crippled normal concert life, but the seasonal rhythms can still be discerned in the reduced output of streamed concerts. We’re now in Holy Week, and concerts celebrating the theme of Easter are briefly taking over the schedules.

However Easter is a difficult theme on which to hang a concert, as the solemnity of the season enforces a dark and serious tone. Wednesday night’s concert from Gesualdo Six at Kings Place, London, didn’t try to sweeten the pill. All the music came from the Renaissance era, apart from two slender modern pieces, and the music was all built around themes of penitence and sorrow. Added to which the palette of sounds on the face of it seemed small; six male voices, reduced sometimes to a quartet or quintet.

In fact, the variety of sound and feeling was astonishing, and coupled with the intimacy of just six voices it made for an enthralling hour. Sometimes the performances really made you sit up and take notice, like the three Tenebrae Responseries by that half-crazed melancholic of the late Renaissance, Count Carlo Gesualdo.

“My soul is sorrowful even unto death,” says the text, and the singers found a startlingly harsh even ugly sound. Then, in typical Gesualdo fashion, the music suddenly burst into animated motion on the word “fugiam” (flee), slowing and descending by degrees to sepulchral stillness, an effect beautifully caught by the performers.

There was drama elsewhere too. Judith Bingham’s Watch With Me combined the biblical narrative of the night in Gethsemane with lines culled from Wilfrid Owen about distant cannon-fire. Bingham set these lines to uncanny hummed harmonies while the singers passed the narrative from voice to voice, occasionally breaking the calmness with bursts of suppressed anxiety.

At the opposite pole was the innocent lightness of Joanna Ward’s Christus Factus Est. The effect of a single, dancing line shadowing itself before being abruptly pushed aside by other ideas created a vivid feeling of innocence and mystery. It was engaging on a musical level but hard to relate to the solemn message of the words: “Christ became for us obedient unto death.”

These were the easier things to seize an audience’s attention with. Harder were the bigger pieces by three great Renaissance composers. Here drama was confined to understated touches like a descent to dark sounds for “night”, and expressivity was focused more on the intricate weave of voices and many small but telling fluctuations in tempo.

With only solo voices in play it’s easy for that weave to be disturbed and ruffled as the musical interest passes from singer to singer, but this group achieved a lovely balance between the interesting individual parts and the sonorous magic of the whole.

William Byrd’s Miserere Mei Deus and Tomás Luis de Victoria’s Tenebrae Responseries were wonderful, but the divine simplicity of Thomas Tallis’s Lamentations was even more telling. The way the singers gradually withdrew to stillness and quietness as the music found its way to the close was deeply moving. IH

Watch this concert until April 7 at kingsplace.co.uk