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”.

Jakub Hrůša leads the CSO in pedestrian Janáček and Rachmaninov, but Strauss's Four Last Songs and Wagner's Tristan excerpts send audiences home deeply touched.

In his first New York appearance since the termination of his contract as BSO Music Director, Nelsons courts public sympathy and makes some thrilling music.