Performer: John Reid

Billed under the heading ‘Echoes of Youth’, this Kings Place programme is an attractive ragbag of unlikely bedfellows. 

A “Sound Unwrapped” programme, featuring Aurora Orchestra's trimmed line-up of five musicians and one sound engineer on electronics, proves to be an absolute success. 

Das Lied von der Erde may have been down-sized but it lost none of its stature in the Aurora Orchestra’s performance of a chamber arrangement of Mahler’s great song-symphony.

“Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery”, goes the familiar phrase, and that can be applied in life to any number of things, including music. Were the father of harmony, Johann Sebastian Bach, still alive today, he would be beyond flattered.

When I collected my ticket for this evening’s Late Mix concert in Hall Two of The Sage Gateshead, I was somewhat surprised to see it marked as unreserved seating. A computer glitch, I thought, until I walked into the hall and found that the usual rows of seats in this small, in-the-round auditorium had been replaced with café-style tables and chairs.

You are sitting in the choir stalls of the Royal Festival Hall, watching the ceramic artist and writer Edmund de Waal address you, his back to an enormous sea of empty, grey, imposing seats. He is delivering a vivid narrative account of a day in the life of a young aristocratic Jewish boy in early 20th-century Vienna.