Sō Percussion and guests bring a vibrant and multivalent performance to BAM

Steve Reich turned 80 last month, and New Yorkers finally pencilled him, between the Greenwich Village Halloween Parade and the daunting presidential election, for big birthday bash at Carnegie Hall.

On Thursday night, I left a concert longing for a tranquilizer, but at Saturday night’s Man Forever/Sō Percussion concert, I began wishing for sedatives about three minutes into the first set. Before the performance, the audience sat entranced by a subtle humming drifting through the Grace Rainey Rogers Auditorium at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

Nico Muhly describes A Scream and an Outrage, the weekend of events he curated at the Barbican this weekend, as like a dinner party, “a gathering of friends and family new and old; loosely organised”.

Songs and symphonies from Sir Simon Rattle and the London Symphony Orchestra, concluding with a vision of “heavenly life” from Gustav Mahler. 

Late Brahms, early Schoenberg: under Lahav Shani and the Rotterdam Philharmonic draw tenderness from two monumental scores.