Music We'd Like to Hear with Anton Lukoszevieze and Tim Parkinson

At Wigmore Hall, Apartment House entertains and delights in a day of concerts, while Elaine Mitchener finds her voice in impressive style. 

“Take an object. Do something to it. Do something else to it. Do something else to it”. These are Morton Feldman’s own words on his Patterns in a Chromatic Field. And they are a concise and accurate description of what occurs during the piece. Patterns... is one of Feldman’s later works, composed in 1981.

There’s something strange about applauding at the end of very quiet music: it is counterintuitive to make more noise clapping than the performers made during the actual performance. But the appreciative Kings Place crowd in Hall Two knew the drill, and this concert of “Some Recent Silences”, as it was billed, proved justly popular.

Arriving to Southbank’s Purcell Room after a romantic Sunday evening walk along the river, I was in the perfect frame of mind to hear this excellently conceived concert. A concert that turned out to be both excellently performed and thoroughly enjoyable. The venue has a lot to offer – the Brutalist design belies the comfort and the sharp acoustic that is rarer than it should be in concert venues.

Viktoria Mullova is a superb soloist in Brahms' Violin Concerto, while an orchestra full of soloists play Bartók’s Concerto for Orchestra with Kahchun Wong presiding. 

Kristiina Poska directs the RSNO in gripping Tchaikovsky and Pärt, but words and music only occasionally match in Elena Langer's new song cycle.