The Escher String Quartet makes Shostakovich blaze at the Wigmore Hall, plus the rest of January's classical concerts

Tchaikovsky’s quartet was also maximally intense, the collective vibrato of the four players creating an almost tropical heat. Which was fine at certain moments, but not so wonderful for the very opening, which surely needs a more tender and reticent sound. Intoxicating and impressive though these performances were, they sometimes gave an exaggerated glow to the music, like a touched-up photo of a landscape that’s beautiful enough already.

Ironically enough, it was in Shostakovich’s Ninth Quartet that the group seemed most at home. Tropical heat is absolutely the last quality this quartet needs, with its strange switchbacks between timid lyricism, savage parody, and a bleached-out mechanical quality tinged with pathos, like a sad-eyed puppet. And yet it was here that the quartet truly shone. Their performance caught exactly the music’s suppressed trembling-under-the surface expressivity, and made its complicated and potentially puzzling journey towards the final explosive dance – gleeful or nihilistic? – seem exactly right. IH

The Escher Quartet’s recent release of quartets by Dvořák, Tchaikovsky and Borodin is on the BIS label

Total Immersion: Leonard Bernstein, Barbican ★★★★☆

Twice a year the BBC offers a day-long Total Immersion in the music of a modern composer we know little about. Yesterday it was the turn of Leonard Bernstein, who as one of the most famous musicians of all time seems the least deserving candidate imaginable.

Still, this is Bernstein’s centenary year, and though some of his classical works are programmed fairly regularly, others are almost unknown. This Total Immersion day brought a number of those neglected works to light, and some of them proved to be treasures. Even those that weren’t were worth hearing for the light they shed on the composer, such as the Clarinet Sonata of 1942, which showed Bernstein’s gift for stylistic mimicry already fully formed.

This was one of the chamber works brilliantly performed by musicians from the Guildhall School of Music & Drama. Another was the late Arias and Barcarolles, a would-be witty set of vocal duets, which needed a good editor. By contrast the late piano piece Touches: Chorale, Eight Variations and Coda for piano was beautifully concise, and the stylistic borrowings so subtle you hardly knew whether it was jazz or the expressionism of Alban Berg that lay behind those lush harmonies.

Later came a concert which reminded us of Bernstein’s Jewish side, with a performance from the BBC Singers of Hashkiveinu, his only piece for the synagogue, alongside other pieces including the much-loved Chichester Psalms.

As always the day came to a climax at the main evening event. Here the BBC Symphony Orchestra and conductor David Charles Abell wowed us with a concert that was intelligently programmed, lavishly resourced, carefully rehearsed, and carried off with terrific brio.

After the overture to Bernstein’s “comic operetta” Candide, thrown off with the requisite brilliance, violinist Vadim Gluzman gave us a performance of Bernstein’s violin concerto Serenade that caught all the music’s beautiful neo-classical poise and grace and radiant serenity.

Finally came a work of absurd extravagance that only the BBC could take on: the Songfest of 1977, a series of 13 songs that evoke every shade of the American experience across 300 years of its history, from poets as various as Whitman and E E Cummings.

The six soloists, three of them American, did the work proud. Tenor Nicky Spence was entertainingly self-mocking in Zizi’s Lament, the three women (soprano Sophie Burgos and mezzo-sopranos J’Nai Bridges and Fleur Barron) rapturous in To My Dear and Loving Husband.

When all six joined in the final setting of Edgar Allen Poe’s Israfel, the effect was overwhelming. True, Bernstein’s stylistic borrowings were plain at every point, but his skill in transforming them was so winning, and the overall vision so heart-felt and generous, that somehow one didn’t mind. IH

Hear this concert on the BBC iPlayer via the Radio 3 website

London Sinfonietta At 50, Royal Festival Hall ★★★★☆

Fifty years ago, the world’s best-known modern music orchestra was born, in London. Within 10 years, they’d recorded on the Beatles’ Apple label, worked with gurus of post-war modernism such as Pierre Boulez and Karlheinz Stockhausen, and unveiled the classics of European and American musical modernism to the somewhat bemused and parochial musical world of Seventies Britain. And that was only the beginning.

Surveying 50 years of history involving 400 commissioned works in a two-and-a-half hour concert was never going to be a practical proposition. Instead, the Sinfonietta gave us a two-part event, which looked back to the classics of musical modernism in the first half and jumped forward to the present in the second.

A proper birthday concert ought to start with a fanfare, which we got, sort of. It was a modernist version of a fanfare, in the form of Harrison Birtwistle’s The Message, an obstreperous dialogue between trumpet and clarinet on either side of the stage, with an equally obstreperous side-drum mediating in the middle. The presiding genius of English musical modernism was present to hear his own piece, and made a gracious speech in praise of the Sinfonietta, alongside the group’s co-founders, conductor David Atherton and general manager Nicholas Snowman.

To go from that to the pert neo-classical wit of Stravinsky’s Octet was quite a jolt, and going from Stravinsky to the surreal/comic outbursts and quiet murmurings of György Ligeti’s Chamber Concerto was even more disconcerting. But they are both indubitable masterpieces, and they received poised and polished performances from the band.

It’s fair to say none of the four world premieres in the second half reached those heights, but there was plenty to tease and charm the ear and engage the mind. The most subtle was a concerto for piano played with the left hand and orchestra by Danish composer Hans Abrahamsen, which veered between tranced immobility, wide-eyed simplicity and leaping frenetic activity, and left behind an aftertaste of aloof inscrutability.

That teasing emotional elusiveness is typical of modernist music, and we heard it again in the evening’s grand finale, a set of 14 40-second variations on a vigorous and harmonically surprising Hornpipe by Henry Purcell written by 14 different composers, with a more extensive coda from John Woolrich. But interestingly, it was the variations by the male composers that had that hard-edged, glittery allusiveness and wit; the ones by women composers were meditative, softer-edged and emotionally direct in an almost guileless way.

That same stance of emotional and musical directness was struck earlier in the two world premieres by female composers. Deborah Pritchard’s River Above, a musical meditation on the well-known haiku How Wild the Sea Is by Basho, wore its reverent feelings very much on its sleeve. Everything in the piece was instantly graspable; there was none of the obscurity and sense of a mystery that has to be unravelled, which has always been the hallmark of “new music”. Much the same could be said of Samantha Fernando’s Formations, a beautifully tranquil meditation on the feelings prompted by the composer’s first pregnancy.

All this prompted the thought: is the London Sinfonietta is undergoing a sea change? Might the dazzling half-century of male complexity and dissonance and vaunting conceptual ambition now be giving way to something more intimate and soft-edged and feminine? This intriguing event certainly suggested so. IH

Hear this concert on the BBC iPlayer via the Radio 3 website

London Symphony Orchestra, Barbican ★★★★☆

The London Symphony Orchestra has always had a flair for French orchestral magic, and this year it’s playing to that strength by taking on the gifted and intelligent François-Xavier Roth as Principal Guest Conductor. He’s passionate about those fluffy late 19th-century French composers we’re meant to despise, like Jules Massenet, who once described his own music as “entertainment for tired businessmen”, and Édouard Lalo, who laced his music with those picture-postcard evocations of Spain and the East that are now frowned on as “orientalism”.

We heard both composers in the concert Roth conducted with the LSO last night, though it was actually Massenet who gave us the seductive, castanet-drenched Spanishisms, in the ballet suite from his opera Le Cid. However, the evening’s main attraction was a recently discovered early piece by Debussy, the Première Suite d’Orchestre (First Orchestral Suite).

Hearing Debussy’s piece in the company of these earlier composers was fascinating, as it reminded us just how much he owed to them. The opening movement Fête (Festival) had a delicious swaying waltz melody that wasn’t so far from Massenet, and the final movement Cortège et Bacchanale (Procession and Bacchanale) had a soaring string melody for strings and cellos that could almost have come from a Tchaikovsky ballet.

Alongside these reminders of Debussy’s musical roots were tantalising glimpses of the radical modernist he would become. The final movement briefly evoked the feeling of a procession approaching from afar, something he did much more effectively in his Nocturnes 15 years later. The first movement even opened a window onto the evanescent, twilight world of his ballet Jeux, composed 30 years later in 1913.

Roth was alert to all these fleeting moments, and made sure we noticed them. But he didn’t downplay the passages of old-fashioned exuberant romanticism, in fact he relished them, as did the orchestra, which was on ravishing form. In all, it was a fascinating experience.

The evening’s other curiosity was the rarely-played Cello Concerto by Lalo. There were only flashes of the Mediterranean heat and charm of the Symphonie Espagnole, the one piece by Lalo most people know, but the brilliant young soloist Edgar Moreau certainly made the most of them. With his beautiful unforced tone, angelic purity of tuning and impeccable fast finger-work Moreau lightened the self-conscious seriousness of Lalo’s piece and made it seem better than it really is. He is clearly a talent to watch. IH

Organ Spectacular, London Philharmonic Orchestra, Royal Festival Hall ★★★☆☆

The popular packaging of this London Philharmonic Orchestra concert as an "Organ Spectacular", complete with Bach's Toccata and Fugue in D minor and Saint-Saёns's Organ Symphony, disguised the fact that a real rarity was being smuggled in. Among his many accomplishments, the Belgian composer Joseph Jongen (1873-1953) was a virtuoso organist, and the challenges of his Symphonie Concertante for organ and orchestra are not for the faint-hearted. Fortunately, Westminster Abbey's James O'Donnell was on hand to play it, and wove a brilliantly colourful dialogue with the orchestra, his registrations exploiting all the potential of the Festival Hall organ.

Jongen's work, premiered in 1928, inhabits an impressionistic soundworld, though the muscular, striding opening suggests a somewhat butch Debussy. A puckish organ solo at the start of the second movement opens up pastoral suggestions before a mysterious mood descends in the slow movement. In the finale's swirling toccata, O'Donnell's virtuosity was matched by the orchestra in an exciting ride.

Each half of the concert was prefaced by a short work. Fauré’s Pavane followed the interval, and Bach's ubiquitous showpiece had opened the evening. In the Festival Hall's unforgiving acoustics, playing contrapuntal organ music is like tightrope walking; O'Donnell never lost his balance and even dared to venture some snazzy ornamentation, yet unsurprisingly his Toccata and Fugue was a bit breathless and lacked rhetorical freedom.

Though Dirk Brossé has previously conducted the LPO in film music, his presence here was hard to fathom – could anyone really confuse movie scores with music for organ and orchestra? (Don't answer that.) As a Belgian he may have had some credentials for the Jongen, but in the Saint-Saёns he was more of a traffic cop than a grown-up maestro, and conveyed little of the work's steady trajectory from C minor to C major, echoing the heroic struggle and triumph of Beethoven's Fifth Symphony, or the way in which the traditional “Dies Irae” plainchant tune haunts every movement.

But the sense of shape that had been lacking at the start arrived in the serenely yearning slow movement, and by the time of the organ's bracing interventions in the finale the performance had perked up. That movement's big tune, in which the organ leads the charge with nothing less than a major-key transformation of the “Dies Irae” theme, made its full impact, proving again that it is when combined with orchestra that the Festival Hall's organ sounds most truly spectacular. JA

El amor brujo and Goyescas,  BBC Symphony Orchestra, Barbican ★★★★☆

Spanish opera is a little-known quantity in Britain, and this concert provided a salutary reminder of its flavour and its riches: might one of the summer festivals dig into the trove a little deeper?

First off here came Manuel de Falla’s El amor brujo (‘Love the magician’) – not as the relatively familiar ballet suite, but in its original half-hour shape (lost for many years until a manuscript was recovered in 1986) as a gitaneria, a gypsy fireside entertainment combining song, dance and speech, enacted by a single performer. 

The plot is simple: an angry woman resorts to some sexy witchcraft to win back a faithless lover. Here this feisty character was voluptuously embodied by a celebrated flamenco star Maria Toledo, her rough-grained Moorish ululating regrettably amplified but charged with the authentic Hispanic duende. The BBC Symphony Orchestra under the Catalan conductor Josep Pons attacked the score with terrific swagger and verve: one could almost feel the glare of the hard white Andalucian heat and smell the heavy perfume in the sultry evening air.

Enrique Granados’ Goyescas is more substantial – an hour-long one-act opera drawing some of its melodic material from the two suites of piano pieces that Granados wrote in 1909-11, loosely inspired by the paintings of Goya.

Musically, it is clearly influenced by Bizet’s Carmen and Italian verismo operas such as Cavalleria rusticana as well as the native tradition of romantic operetta, the zarzuela.  By turns sensuous, witty, rumbustious and darkly intense, it’s an enchanting affair, marred only by a rather protracted and excessively operatic ending in which the wronged hero Fernando takes an unconscionable time dying at the feet of his beloved Rosario.

Pons and the BBCSO played it to the manner born, revelling in the sinuous and playful rhythms of fandango and jota. Four Spanish soloists did a good job, with the brunt of the singing ably taken by Nancy Fabiola Herrera – a mezzo-soprano admired as Carmen at Covent Garden some years back.

In 1915, Granados was tragically drowned on his return from New York and the successful premiere of Goyescas at the Metropolitan Opera, when a German u-boat torpedoed his liner in the English Channel. He had previously expressed dissatisfaction with the orchestration used and left notes outlining potential revisions. These were incorporated in this engaging performance, which left one curious to see a fully staged production. RC

This concert will be broadcast on BBC Radio 3 in February

The King’s Singers, King’s College Chapel Cambridge ★★★☆☆

The world’s favourite all-male singing group is now 50 years old, but it doesn’t look a day over 30. Last night, the group returned to King’s College Chapel in Cambridge, the very spot where it was born, to celebrate its half-century. Six young men came on in identical dark blue suits and artfully differentiated coloured ties, all smiles and perfect coiffures. Wrapped in the gloom of the chapel, listening to the group singing Shenandoah with their special soft-toned, gentle nostalgia, it seemed as if the years just fell away. It could have been 1968.

Still, if you’ve got a winning formula, why change it? There was only one item in the programme that broke the mould: an ambitious new piece from ultra-trendy New York composer Nico Muhly. Otherwise, it was a retread of all the things that have built the group’s huge global following. We heard two of the dozens of pieces commissioned by the group over the decades, we heard Renaissance polyphony from William Byrd and Orlando Lassus, pop songs, deliciously harmonised folk-song arrangements including one from Bob Chilcott, an ex-member of the King’s Singers (who was in the audience, along with several other ex-members, who at one point all took a bow).

On a certain level, it was perfect. The group’s tuning and blend were hair-raisingly accurate, which was a boon in Francis Poulenc’s Four Prayers of Saint Assisi, with its sinuously louche harmonies, and even more so in the alternately dark and witty Wymondham Chants by Geoffrey Poole. Muhly’s piece, which involved the Chapel choir as well as the group, was an elaborate four-movement meditation on the human instinct for the spiritual. There were moments, especially during the setting of Salman Rushdie’s paean to the beauty of King’s College chapel, when the music achieved a muted radiance, but often it seemed hampered by its own over-complication.

These were the rare moments that registered on the heart and mind. But mostly it seemed as if the group actually wanted to avoid anything like real feeling, in case it spoiled the impression of flawless perfection. The result was that everything, pop or classical, light or deep, sounded more or less the same. When six fine, well-trained singers can make Byrd’s ecstatic Sing Joyfully sound totally flat, you know something has gone badly wrong with their scale of values. It’s the “King’s sound” they really seem to care about, not the music. IH

The King’s Singers 50th anniversary 3-CD boxed set Gold is out now on Signum Records

LSO/Simon Rattle perform Genesis Suite, Barbican ★★★★☆

High art and Hollywood came together in the Genesis Suite, a fascinating 1945 collaboration between seven composers that has now finally received its UK premiere thanks to the questing curiosity of the London Symphony Orchestra's new music director, Simon Rattle. If the hybrid nature of the work nearly defeated its creators back in Los Angeles, then it remained a stumbling block here despite the best intentions of an updated multi-media presentation. But the chance to hear so much neglected music was still very welcome.

"Collaboration" was not quite what happened when it came to getting the two best-known composers on board: Stravinsky and Schoenberg ignored each other from opposite sides of the hall. But the moving force behind this portmanteau work, the Hollywood-based composer Nathaniel Shilkret, assembled his immigrant colleagues in a generous attempt to ease their financial strain. As Rattle noted eloquently in his spoken introduction, they were all refugees.

Schoenberg and Stravinsky were also given prime positions within the work, book-ending it with, respectively, a Prelude suggesting primordial chaos and a finale evoking Babel. Schoenberg's potent music benefits from being the only piece free of voiceover narration, and at the Barbican the four speakers were sometimes a hectoring distraction. Indeed, the video designed by Mike Tutaj in collaboration with Gerard McBurney was also preachy, though its newsreel-style commentary on modern history was pertinent enough.

In their movements, Alexandre Tansman, Mario Castelnuovo-Tedesco and Shilkret himself enter wholeheartedly into the Hollywood spirit, but Ernst Toch puts in a more powerfully rigorous showing with his music for The Rainbow. Most striking of all is Darius Milhaud's Cain and Abel, which provides the work with a punchy centrepiece.

Bartók was one of the big-name composers who "got away" here; invited to participate in the Genesis Suite, he withdrew due to ill health, and indeed died in New York two months before its Los Angeles premiere. So it was an inspired move to complete the concert with his final masterpiece, the Concerto for Orchestra, written in a state of homesick desolation.

Completely inside the musical argument, Rattle shaped a performance of extraordinary intensity. Compared with a few years ago, the LSO is a transformed orchestra: its cultivated sound was warm yet searing, and it wore its virtuosity lightly in the finale. Not even the lingering visual distractions of this concert's multi-media format could dilute that. JA

London Mozart Players, Saint John’s Smith Square ★★★★☆

In a city in a well supplied with bright young chamber orchestras, the venerable London Mozart Players has had to reinvent itself to survive. The signs are that it’s succeeding, triumphantly. The orchestra is roaming into new performing spaces, finding new audiences and working with DJs and young composers.

The trick is to achieve all that without deserting the high ground of the classics, which is where the orchestra made its reputation in the first place. Thursday night’s concert at Saint John’s Smith Square signalled that intention loud and clear. They played one of Beethoven’s sternest overtures, Coriolan, and two mighty works of Brahms, the 1st Symphony and Violin Concerto.

Canny as well as high-minded, the LMP bagged as soloist Nicola Benedetti, the biggest draw among violinists anywhere. On the podium was Leonard Elschenbroich, the cellist of Byronic good-looks who is Benedetti’s regular chamber-music partner, and is now branching out into conducting.

It had the makings of a winningly glamorous formula, but the first half of the concert wasn’t a complete triumph. The orchestra seemed slightly tentative under Elschenbroich’s intelligent, energised but somewhat eccentrically handled baton. And Benedetti’s blunt and unsubtle approach to the first movement of the concerto didn’t allow the music to shine. She didn’t have to attack it with such hard-edged energy – her tone is big enough, after all, and the orchestra was only chamber-sized. But one got the sense that she wanted project the music’s huge scale by flinging off every phrase with maximum brusqueness. Mustering a sweeter tone and allowing more space for the music to breathe would have achieved that better.

Fortunately, in the lovely second movement, she unbent, smiled a little, and actually played the music rather than arm-wrestling it into submission. At that point, the performance started to glow. She unfolded the delicate arabesques that float over the return of the melody with rapturous tenderness, and made the Finale dance with mad gaiety.

By now, the orchestra seemed more alive, and after the interval they and Elschenbroich gave a performance of Brahm’s 1st Symphony that at times touched the heights. Elschenbroich knows that conjuring the grand manner isn’t the best way to let this self-consciously grand piece speak. He brought out the grace of the first movement as well as its loftiness, and when the triumphant melody of the Finale finally emerged from all the storm and stress, it flowed with winning ease and naturalness. IH

The London Mozart Players plays two lunchtime concerts with pianist Howard Shelley at Saint John’s Smith Square on 7 February and 7 March. Details: 020 7222 1061

NYO/Elder, Barbican  ★★★★☆

The brilliance showcased by the National Youth Orchestra of Great Britain always seems to have no bounds, and so it proved again on Sunday evening. Yet despite the precociousness – in the best sense – of these players, one wondered how they would fare in the most grown-up of all operas, Duke Bluebeard’s Castle.

A study in marital loneliness and incompatibility, Bartók’s only work for the lyric stage (premiered a century ago this year) might not seem the most obvious choice for the NYO’s first complete opera: if a little of its unremitting pessimism went missing here, the performance was still powerful enough to have probably left the players’ parents in the audience thoroughly depressed.

In fact, any shortcomings here had little to do with the young musicians themselves, who played impeccably. The famous opening of the Fifth Door was thrilling, and the rest of the castle’s decor was brought vividly to life. Strangely, the conductor Mark Elder seemed to hold back from the full expressionistic force of the music, especially in the opening pages, which had little mysterious anguish. If Daisy Evans’s concert staging likewise gilded things a bit, it was resourcefully organic in using the players and their instruments to create atmosphere. The light tubes snaking around the floor may have taken their cues from the text but they had the effect of left-over Christmas decorations.

Robert Hayward was a melancholy Bluebeard, though one without a potent enough bass-baritone to make those Magyar syllables drip with sadness. A late substitute, the mezzo Rinat Shaham may be lighter of voice than ideal for Judith; still, using her lyricism to suggest the wife’s apprehension, she revealed less familiar aspects of the work. Despite being a two-hander, this opera has a further protagonist in the shape of the orchestra, and the NYO fulfilled its role sonorously.

The scene had been set in the first half, with stories from two rather different fairy-tale kingdoms. Conjuring up Liadov’s The Enchanted Lake with shimmering delicacy and warmth, the NYO responded to Elder’s natural way of unfolding the music, and he treated the orchestra as he would any more mature ensemble. Elder was also mercurial in his conducting of Dukas’s The Sorcerer’s Apprentice. The bassoon section had a good night, but indeed everyone relished their opportunities in the only work of the evening that gave the orchestra big tunes and a chance to shine glitteringly. JA

Broadcast on BBC Radio 3 on January 9, and available thereafter on the BBC iPlayer.

Further NYO projects and concerts: nyo.org.uk

Time Unwrapped, Kings Place, London N1 ★★★★☆

Time is the most mysterious thing in life, remorseless in its ticking progress, yet strangely slippery, bending and dilating when we’re dreaming, and sometimes appearing to stop entirely. “What is time? If no one asks me, I know what it is; if someone asks me, I do not know,” said St Augustine. That was one of several telling quotations on the topic offered by writer Paul Griffiths, in his lecture given yesterday to launch the year-long concert series at Kings Place which explores time, entitled Time Unwrapped.

The series’ conceit is that, though St Augustine and mortals like us may not know what time is, composers and musicians certainly do. Or rather, they can subvert everyday clock-time with their cunning rhythmic and formal patterns. Time is their medium, as surely as paint and canvas is the painter’s. Griffiths offered a whistle-stop tour of the different way composers have bent time over 1,000 years, from the calm objectivity of church plainchant to the urgent, desire-driven music of Schubert a millennium later, and beyond.

It’s an enthralling story, but not one the series itself will be telling. It escapes time’s arrow, ranging freely back and forth across the centuries, offering a kaleidoscope of different ways musicians have controlled the flow of time. The tight, pulsing mechanisms of New York minimalism, the floating ecstasies of Renaissance polyphony and the single luminous moments conjured by early modernists all feature. There are exhibitions too, including a fascinating one now showing of self-portraiture’s special relationship to the passage of time.

Where to start such a series? Only one work would do: Haydn’s oratorio The Creation. The Bible doesn’t actually tell us that time was created in the Beginning, along with Light, but it surely sprang into being at that very same moment. That’s what the music seemed to be saying in this performance. The Representation of Chaos that opens the work seemed bereft of time as well as form, groping about in mournful pulse-less distress. When finally the blaze of major-chord musical light came with the words “and there was LIGHT”, time leapt into being too.

Like everything else in this performance, the moment was superbly vivid, partly because in the small confines of Kings Place’s Hall 1 everything felt up close and personal. In a row high at the back were the 16 singers of the Choir of the Age of Enlightenment, with trumpets, trombones and kettle-drums squeezed next to them on either side, and down below the Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment.

In front of the orchestra were soprano Charlotte Beament, tenor James Way and bass Dingle Yandell, all three soloists of the OAE Rising Stars programme. They made up in delightful vernal freshness what they sometimes lacked in sheer vocal heft. It has to be said balance was sometimes a problem for the chorus too. The sheer firepower of the orchestra in the big choruses was overwhelming, with the trombones and the extraordinary 12-foot-high contra-bassoon in full flow.

But one could hardly resent the orchestra’s prominence, when the sounds they conjured were so delicious. Conductor Ádám Fischer took a naïve delight in the music’s own naivety, encouraging the bassoons to coo along with the cooing birds, urging the brass’s roarings in imitation of the roaring “tawny lion”. The best moments were actually the quietest, such as the mysteriously silvery sound conjured by the fortepianist, as the bass told us in a whisper that the angels “struck their immortal harps”. The most startling moment came with the final “Amen”, performed in an awestricken hush. Just for a moment, time seemed to stand still. IH

Until New Year’s Eve. Details: 020 7520 1490; www.kingsplace.co.uk/time

András Schiff, Wigmore Hall ★★★☆☆

Each passing year makes Sir András Schiff ever more one of the elder statesmen of the piano. In terms of his stature and reputation, that is only natural, yet the Hungarian-born British pianist has also consciously cultivated that position.

Looking older now than his 64 years, he exudes an aura of solemnity whenever he steps onto the stage to play, and he is received with reverence everywhere – nowhere more so than by the Wigmore Hall audience, always ready to worship at the feet of its favourites.

Here in his latest Wigmore appearance, for a programme built around late Brahms, Schiff discouraged applause between works, even when switching between composers. Not so much aiming for hushed religiosity as an intimate, drawing room-like experience, he angled the piano (a mellow Bosendörfer) so that more of the audience than usual could see the keyboard. Or was he turning his back to us? With Schiff it is sometimes hard to be sure, but one doesn’t go to a concert to look over the shoulder, as it were, of a musician communing with himself.

It was at least half an hour into the programme before Schiff ventured anything louder – or softer – than a mezzo-forte, and the mood was monochrome. Late Brahms, represented here in the Opp. 117, 118 and 119 sets of pieces, does of course suggest some sort of a summing up, but this music has an autumnal glow that was all but absent.

In fact there was little colour in these short pieces, and the lullaby that opens the Three Intermezzos (Op. 117) was very matter of fact. The middle one of this set sounded only quietly agitated, and the final piece became a ghostly picture of death and transfiguration.

Had Schiff stopped there, it might have been possible to see this as an interesting, if somewhat severe, interpretation of these musical gems. But he ploughed on. Despite the first of the Six Piano Pieces (Op. 118) being tagged with the instruction “appassionato”, it was resolutely measured; the swagger of this set’s Ballade was also a little compromised, though the hymn-like aspect of the Romanze came across with striking warmth.

The opening Intermezzo of the Four Piano Pieces (Op. 119) sounded more etiolated than ever, leaving one to conclude that Brahms is not Schiff’s natural repertoire.

For all its shortcomings, this was at least an intellectually interesting programme: Schiff combined his Brahms with late – or at least serious and valedictory – music by the great masters Brahms worshipped most. He prefaced everything with Schumann’s Ghost Variations, the composer’s last work, written around the time of his attempt to drown himself in the Rhine. With its obvious and understandable flaws, it is a work that needs sympathetic championship, but all Schiff did in unfolding it so laconically was to underline Schumann’s fragility of mind.

Schiff also made Mozart (the Rondo in A minor, K511) sound like Brahms, and by meandering through Bach (the B minor Prelude and Fugue from Book 1 of the Well-Tempered Clavier) he took introspection to new heights.

Then something happened. Allowing a little applause after signing off the last Brahms piece, Schiff seemed liberated and delivered the final segment of the evening as if it was a different concert. Beethoven’s Les Adieux Sonata suddenly burst out full of colour and Romantic sweep. There was even wit in the exhilarating finale, something he had missed entirely a little earlier in the Brahms that had been marked “giocoso”. Too late to save the whole evening, Schiff’s marvellous Beethoven at least blew the cobwebs away. JA

Schumann Quartet, Wigmore Hall  ★★★★☆

We’re in a golden age for young string quartets. Hardly a month goes by without another brilliant debut that leaves critics scrabbling for new superlatives. Even so, the Schumann Quartet is something special. This group, consisting of three brothers of German/Japanese parentage together with an Estonian-born violist, last night played a sensational all-Haydn concert at the Wigmore Hall.

The word is apt, because there was hardly a bar that didn’t display a jaw-dropping virtuosity. Even a simple major chord played by this group seemed special, filling the hall with an almost supernaturally radiant and powerful sound. As for the numerous passages of rapid-fire conversational give-and-take, they were infallibly precise. But some might ask: do we really want “sensational” performances of a composer who more than any other exalts the sane middle ground of life? Rumbustious wit, robust good humour and a devoutly chaste lyricism are the qualities that make Haydn treasurable. In order to speak to us, they don’t need to be exaggerated or buffed to a high sheen.

That reservation crept over me a few times in Wednesday night’s concert. The first movement of the G major quartet Op 33 was typical of the evening in its ostentatious brilliance. It zipped along at a giddy pace, the accented notes flung off with perfect drilled precision. But the tempo was so fast that the shape of the lines was hard to discern. Haydn had one of the quickest minds of any composer who ever lived, which is why performers sometimes need to let the music breathe a little, giving it time to register on the listener, rather than pressing down hard on the accelerator.

Fortunately, there were many more moments when real musicality was discernible through the brilliance. Two of the four quartets featured those hymn-like slow movements that were Haydn’s trademark, and these shone with a truly rapt, innocent glow. In the gravely beautiful Quartet Op 42, the players showed they’d grasped that mysterious aloof quality of Haydn, which can sometimes take on a paradoxical quality of being deeply moving – as it did here, thanks to the strangely lost, lonely tone summoned by the leader Erik Schumann.

Finally, in Haydn’s last completed quartet, they made the witty off-beat jokes seem even wittier when the music came round for a second time, pausing for an extra millisecond just to make sure we were thoroughly wrong-footed. From such tiny details are great performances made. IH

The Schumann Quartet’s recent album Landscapes, with music by Haydn, Bartók, Pärt and Takemitsu, is available on Berlin Classics