Louis Lortie's intense and witty Chopin at Wigmore Hall, plus all of April 2017's best classical concerts

But focus returned again with the cello-like eloquence of the left hand in No. 6 in B minor, and from then on all the moods registered, with Lortie encompassing unrelenting torrents, glowing solemnity and brilliant virtuosity. That miniature tone poem nicknamed the “Raindrop” Prelude was beautifully sustained, with Lortie making the most of his instrument’s dusky tone, but the Fazioli also thundered powerfully in the middle of this piece. Any unevenness in Lortie’s Preludes paled next to their cumulative effect.

Lortie demonstrated his flair for programming by prefacing Chopin’s miniatures with a set of modernist miniatures. George Benjamin’s Shadowlines, dating from 2001 and subtitled “six canonic preludes”, provided imaginative contrast yet also suggested some unsuspected affinities: just as Poland’s greatest composer traced a French connection through his father and a life of exile in Paris, so one of Britain’s most outstanding contemporary composers has been almost an honorary Frenchman since his studies with Olivier Messiaen.

That characteristic French love of sonority certainly comes through in Shadowlines, though it is allied to a rigorous sense of structure. From a tantalising prologue through the first few preludes, Lortie played with intensity and wit. Even if the final two pieces didn’t quite seem to sustain the opening promise, this was an interesting juxtaposition from a thoughtful pianist. JA

Listen to this and other Radio 3 Lunchtime Concerts on the BBC iPlayer.

Michael Fabiano, Wigmore Hall ★★★☆☆

Despite raves and ovations for recent performances at Glyndebourne and Covent Garden, the American tenor Michael Fabiano’s solo recital drew only a half-full house – those empty seats suggesting that the Wigmore Hall has a core audience immovably suspicious of any programme that doesn’t involve something by Schubert.

Yet one must admit that this was a disconcerting occasion. Here was a tremendous talent, operating at full pelt, but not one naturally attuned to the intimacies and nuances of song. The personality behind it is an awkward fit too: Fabiano is a lean and hungry Jersey boy, shaven-headed and wired up. Interviews detail his obsession with fast cars and flying his own plane, and I guess he doesn’t adapt easily to backstage flitter-flutter. The French have a word for the likes of him – farouche, both fierce and shy.

The voice is magnificent, made to scale heights and depths, and his technique is handled with muscular skill and iron steadiness. But the timbre is hard-edged, and he has to work hard to deliver anything sweet and tender; his singing doesn’t float like a butterfly or sting like a bee. He is too determined to impress: personal charm – the magic ingredient of every great recitalist – is in short supply.

The first half of the evening was devoted to songs in French. This may be a language that Fabiano has studied conscientiously, but he seems to produce sound too deep in his throat to honour its evasive consonants and delicate vowels: in a group by Duparc, Phidylé was delivered with rock-solid legato but no voluptuous sensuality, while the Gothic horror of Le Manoir de Rosemonde was violently alarming rather than eerily sinister. Liszt’s Ah! quand je dors was thrilling in its way, but never deliquesced into erotic rapture; a lighter note was struck in Comment, disaient-ils and Enfant, si j’étais roi.

After the interval, Fabiano got off to a cracking start with some irresistible songs by Puccini, written around the time of Tosca and Madama Butterfly: the majestic Inno a Diana drew spontaneous applause. A student effort Mentià l’avviso began with a recitative of unintentionally comical melodrama but opened up to into a gorgeous broad melody indicative of mature glories to come. Here Fabiano was quite at home, accompanied by Julius Drake’s unfailingly supportive and characterful piano-playing. I wasn’t so keen on Samuel Barber’s op.10 songs, delivered in oddly accented English and brought to a very, very loud climax with I hear an army.

But two encores glowed: Lensky’s aria from Eugene Onegin was exquisitely shaped and in the simple ardour of Tosti’s L’alba separa, Fabiano seemed finally to relax and love himself a bit.

Housekeeping note:  before the music starts at the Wigmore Hall, a recording bids us turn off our mobile phones. The admonishing speakers have in the past included the soothing Sue MacGregor and the lordly John Tusa. Can the current holder of this important office really be that saucy chat-show king Graham Norton? It certainly sounds like him. RC

Daniel Hope, Wigmore Hall ★★★★☆

I have seen the violinist Daniel Hope several times and, on each occasion, I have left the concert wondering why he isn’t a bigger star. He certainly looks the part; tall and commanding with an imposing mane of red hair. Yet, there is a distinct lack of ego – his playing sometimes suggesting a fine sense of communication with his fellow musicians, and at others embarking on his own voyage of discovery, his face locked in a quizzical expression. Hope is not the archetypal showman.

Last night, accompanied by the Basel Chamber Orchestra, he displayed a sort of cerebral chutzpah in two works. Firstly, with Bach’s Concerto in A Minor for Violin, he demonstrated a brisk poise, carefully teasing out the more lyrical moments while maintaining technical assurance. The Andante, which makes up the middle section, was in danger of sounding a little sluggish, but was saved by Hope’s careful delineation of different modes of expression.

Mendelssohn’s Concerto in D Minor for violin and strings, written when the composer was only 13, and repatriated into the canon by Yehudi Menuhin in the Fifties (Hope’s mother worked for Menuhin and he later became the young violinist’s mentor) is a playful work with a terrific sense of freedom.

The challenge for the soloist is to convey drama, romance and even a little nostalgia within an incredibly short space of time, and both Hope and the Orchestra achieved this with little fuss. The highlights were the fiendishly difficult technical tussle at the end of the Allegro, and the playful leap from the Andante to the Allegro Assai. Occasional intricacies were missed within the delirium of the final movement, but this was, ultimately, a lively account of a tumultuous work.

After the interval, the Basel Chamber Orchestra took centre stage with two 20th-century works, the first of which was new to me. Martin’s Pavane couleur du temps, inspired by a Perrault fairy tale, turned out to be a meandering river of a piece with an enigmatic coda. There was an air of almost melancholic lyricism about it, but the tightly controlled performances (led by Anders Kjellberg Nilsson) ironed out any potential smudges.

Bartók’s Divertimento for Strings, written in 1939 for this very orchestra, emits a sort of folksiness in parts while never forgetting a sense of impending doom (Bartók wrote the piece to take his mind off the rapidly approaching War). Here, an extraordinary depth of sound was achieved and, in the final movement, any resistance for the soloists to over-emphasise their roles was kept in check and everyone worked together to create a sweeping resolution.

Here was a fine evening of contrast, performed with clarity and rigour. Next time, I hope that Hope will get the grand stage he deserves. BL

St John Passion (with Britten Sinfonia, Simon Russell Beale and Mark Padmore)/Barbican Centre  ★★★★☆

The interpretation of Bach’s Easter Passions has passed through two revolutions in the last half century. First came the revival of authentic performance practice in the 1960s and 1970s, then a thoroughly inauthentic vogue for staging them as ersatz operas.

The former movement has brought great illumination, energizing the music and giving new definition to its shape and sonority; the latter has been the regrettable pretext for a lot of actorly posturing that conflicts with the idea that Bach intended these works as aids to deep internal meditation on the sufferings of Christ. I shudder to recall the vulgar sobfest that Peter Sellars made of the St Matthew at the Proms in 2014 and only hope that it marked the end of that particular road.

Happily, there were no extraneous histrionics in the Britten Sinfonia’s version of the St John, although in its way it proved bracingly innovative. Rather than trivialising the spiritual drama with visual tableaux and maudlin breast-beating, it aimed to restore a sense of the liturgical context that the first congregations in Pietist Leipzig might have experienced by punctuating the score with devotional readings eloquently delivered by Simon Russell Beale.

As a prologue, we heard the opening verses of St John’s Gospel; at the close of the first half, three sections from T S Eliot’s Ash Wednesday, in place of what would have been an hour-long sermon; after the tenor aria reflecting on Christ’s scourging came Psalm 22 (“My God, my God, why hast Thou forsaken me?”); and after the final chorale, an exquisite Motet by Jakob Handl dating from 1577, which Bach himself programmed and in which Beale (a former Cambridge chorister) quietly joined.

A small force of singers and instrumentalists was arranged in a semi-circle, the chorus of 12 also singing the solos and the recitatives of Christ and the other characters. Standing as part of this chorus, but also conducting where necessary and acting as the narrating Evangelist was Mark Padmore, surely the supreme exponent of this music today, bringing to it intense grief and anger as well as the simple clarity of the story-teller.

The playing was excellent throughout, with some particularly fine obbligato provided by Reiko Ichise’s viola da gamba. The chorus of 12 produced some fine singing of the arias too, with Elinor Rolfe Johnson seraphic in ‘Zerfliesse, mein Herze’ and Padmore himself mesmerising in the tormented Erwäge, wie sein blutgefärbter Rücken’. Timothy Dickinson made a dignified Christ, light in timbre but without bluster or bravado.

If the performance didn’t quite reach the sublime heights and left me colder than it should, the blame must lie with the Barbican Hall’s flat acoustic and bland atmosphere. Perhaps I was unlucky to be sitting to one side towards the front of the Stalls, but the balance wasn’t always well adjusted and the counterpoint often indistinct – particularly in the great opening chorus which sounded like mush. A further performance that took place Saturday night in King’s College Chapel, Cambridge, may well have had the magic element missing in the concert hall. RC

Alamire, St John's Smith Square ★★★★☆

No festival is complete without a premiere, and the Holy Week Festival at St John’s Smith Square’s offered a very unusual one. The choir Alamire unveiled a piece from the reign of Henry VIII, not heard in London since 1544.

As the personable director of Alamire, David Skinner, reminded us, this was a time when church music was entangled in doctrinal upheavals and power politics. Skinner is a canny operator, as well as a fine musician. He knows we just can’t get enough of Tudor wives and the murky world of palace intrigues they lived in. The “Wolf Hall effect” has certainly worked well for him. In 2015, he and Alamire released two Tudor-themed albums, one entitled The Spy’s Choirbook, the other containing pieces from Anne Boleyn’s songbook.

In this concert they performed another piece with political connections, which was only discovered in 1978 lurking behind plasterboard in Corpus Christi College, in Cambridge. See, Lord, and Behold is one of the grandest pieces by the greatest composer of that era, Thomas Tallis. Originally this was a huge six-part sacred piece in praise of the Virgin, but in 1544 Henry VIII needed to stir up patriotic feelings, as he was fighting wars on two fronts. His wife Katherine Parr – clearly no milksop – kitted out Tallis’s piece with a vengeful new text. “Cast them down hedlonge,” she raged against her husband’s enemies. “For they are treatours and raybels agaynst me.”

It looks stirring stuff on paper. In this performance, finely sung by the choir, it proved to be a bit of a damp squib. In musical terms the piece is one of Tallis’s greatest. It has a kaleidoscopic variety of vocal combinations, and long traceries of counterpoints, each line buoying up its neighbour like the arches in a cathedral. The problem was the music’s lofty, otherworldly beauty felt completely out of synch with the angry words. It was an opportunistic purloining of a sacred piece for a political situation which has long gone.

Fortunately, the real heart of this concert lay elsewhere. It was devoted entirely to Thomas Tallis, and in Skinner’s carefully chosen programme his towering stature as one of the great composers of the era seemed clearer than ever. The variety of sound in the Catholic, Latin pieces in the first half was astonishing and deeply expressive. In the famous O Nata lux (O Light Born of Light) there was a lovely example of the “wrong-note” quality in Tallis’s harmony. Skinner and the choir relished it in a way that was just this side of self-indulgent – rightly so, as these ear-bending moments have a paradoxical power to magnify the music’s other-worldly radiance.

Not everything about the performances was spot-on. The choir has some powerful basses amongst the singers, and the sound sometimes seemed bottom-heavy. And in the concert’s second half, devoted to the English, Protestant side of Tallis’s music, the long Litany seemed flinty and unvaried compared to the compassionate, intimate performance it received from Gallicantus at the Wigmore Hall some weeks ago. But at their best, as in the delicately intricate In pace in idipsum, the choir sang with a wonderful combination of rhythmic energy and contemplative radiance. IH

Alamire’s The Spy’s Choirbook and Anne Boleyn’s Songbook are released on Obsidian Records (alamire.co.uk).

Yuja Wang, Royal Festival Hall ★★★☆☆

Yuja Wang certainly knows how to work a crowd. At her recital at the Royal Festival Hall on Tuesday night, the elfin Chinese virtuoso changed gowns and hair colour between halves, a trick normally associated with a certain kind of soprano. She teasingly omitted the two Schubert piano pieces from the programme, and instead of offered us no fewer than four encores.

By the end, the crowd had been driven wild, but it was noticeably subdued at the end of the first half, after Wang’s very peculiar performance of Chopin’s complete Preludes. Admittedly, few pianists in the world make such a sheerly beautiful sound as Yuja Wang, and it took some time to notice just how strange the performance was. Her control of piano texture was so mesmerising: the trickle-down effect in the 11th Prelude was rendered with perfect delicacy, and the mysterious hanging “wrong note” at the end of the 20th Prelude had exactly the right weight.

But beauty on its own means nothing, as this performance proved so eloquently. Alarm bells started to ring in the famous Fourth Prelude. This should be a droopingly tragic utterance, but here it seemed weirdly detached. As time passed, it became clear that the withdrawn and strangely inert tone of this prelude was going to be the norm. When Wang did try to inject some feeling, as in the 17th Prelude, the fluctuations in tempo had a mechanical feel, like a parody of true Chopin rubato. Only in the furious 18th Prelude were there stirrings of something like feeling.

What this suggested is that Wang becomes emotionally animated only when the music poses an athletic challenge. There was certainly plenty to challenge her in the big piece of the second half, Brahms’s Variations and Fugue on a Theme of Handel. Here Wang’s ability to sort out the strands in a complex texture were a boon. The startling offbeat accidents in the penultimate variation took on a huge energy just because they stood out so sharply.

Then came the encores. As always, Wang’s incredible, steely-fingered virtuosity was dazzling, above all in Prokofiev’s Toccata. But the emotional high point of the encores, the moment in Liszt’s arrangement of Schubert’s “Gretchen at the spinning wheel” where Gretchen remembers Faust’s kiss, went for nothing. There’s an emotional hollowness at the core of Wang’s playing; we can only hope that she will one day find a way to fill it. IH

Yuja Wang appears with the Orchestra of the Accademia Santa Cecilia and Antonio Pappano at the Royal Festival Hall London SE1 on May 11 020 7960 4200

Rossini’s Stabat Mater, Hanover Band & Chorus/Bayl, St John’s Smith Square ★★★★☆

Rossini’s Stabat Mater may be no rarity, but it is rarely given the serious attention it deserves. In the surroundings of the Holy Week Festival at St John’s Smith Square – a venue that more than most avoids the obvious in seasonal music – it received its due as the main part of a programme inspired by this work’s dark orchestral colours. Evoking the anguish of the Mother of Christ before the Cross, the poetry of the Stabat Mater calls for music of a distinctive tint, something the period instruments of the Hanover Band supplied.

Despite being a middle-late work, written after the composer had given up opera, Rossini’s Stabat Mater is sometimes mistakenly viewed as operatic. It certainly did no harm that the evening’s conductor, Benjamin Bayl, has operatic experience and is comfortable with voices, but he was also attuned to the score’s essential starkness and gravity. Even the rollickingly good tune of the tenor soloist’s “Cuius animam” brought to mind Heine’s description of Rossini’s “eternal grace”.

In music that’s all about texture, Bayl unleashed sounds from these period instruments that showed how radical Rossini was, and how indebted to this work Verdi’s Requiem is. But some of the most strikingly unusual effects of all are non-orchestral, for example the chorus with bass recitative, “Eja Mater”. The compact Hanover Chorus sang potently, and among the soloists the women outclassed the men: Gemma Lois Summerfield’s glowing soprano and Caitlin Hulcup’s burnished mezzo each made their mark and blended well in their duet.

But what other works, if not penitential then at least dark-toned, can preface this? Rossini’s Bassoon Concerto is a modern rediscovery and nothing very substantial, so Mozart’s Bassoon Concerto in B flat, K 191, received a welcome airing. A transitional piece from the mid-1770s, it may be old-fashioned with its courtly minuet for a finale, but the slow movement is particularly poignant. The 18th-century bassoon sounds smaller and mustier than today’s instrument, but, with much less silverware than a modern bassoon, is it also even more difficult to play, and the soloist Nathaniel Harrison was impressively nifty in negotiating Mozart’s runs.

These technical challenges had been signalled at the start of the evening by some asthmatic winds in the overture to Rossini’s William Tell. Yet all the colours of what is effectively an Alpine tone poem registered vividly on the period instruments, and Bayl steered this familiar music with fresh imagination. JA

NYO/Prieto, Barbican ★★★★★

“Totally teenage orchestral brilliance” is one of the slogans of the National Youth Orchestra, and unlike many slogans this one is completely true. But in addition to all the teenage brilliance on show here, the success of the NYO’s latest programme was due in no small measure to the Mexican conductor Carlos Miguel Prieto. Drawn from outside the usual pool of NYO conductors, Prieto came ideally equipped through his long experience of the Youth Orchestra of the Americas, and also stamped his mark on the programming.

Mexican composers are seldom heard in our halls, so it was good that this concert featured two of them. Silvestre Revueltas’s La Noche de los Mayas, a four-movement suite drawn from his music to the film of the same name, got things off to a raucous start – but, for all the uproarious energy of the music, the playing was highly disciplined. All four movements invoke the night in their titles, yet only the third (Noche de Yucatán) is a sultry nocturne. An exotic, enlarged percussion section was put in the spotlight in the finale, which also calls for conch shells, and the score urges them to perform “con violenica”. No less colourful, the exuberantly played encore was another popular Mexican classic, Moncayo’s Huapango.

Shostakovich dominated the rest of the evening. Last year’s BBC Young Musician winner, Sheku Kanneh-Mason, returned to the scene of his victory with the same work, the Russian composer’s First Cello Concerto. Digging in with gripping attack yet also plenty of nuance, he showed what a remarkable musician he already is, bringing other-worldly tone to the haunting slow movement and displaying mature musicianship in his handling of the extended cadenza. Unusually, the NYO played with reduced numbers here, and Prieto steered them with taut precision.

If the concerto sounds like a dance on Stalin’s grave, Shostakovich’s Fifth Symphony was written under the threat of Stalin’s purges. It made an interesting counterweight to the two Mexican pieces, which span the time of Trotsky’s assassination in Mexico City. Composed exactly 80 years ago, the Fifth still hasn’t yielded up all its secrets, and it was refreshing to hear a completely new generation play it as a straightforwardly strong symphony – one key to understanding it. Commanding its structure impressively, Prieto unleashed the NYO in a searing performance in which everyone gave their brilliant best. JA

Future NYO concerts: nyo.org.uk

Bavarian Radio Symphony Orchestra/Lucerne Easter Festival ★★★★☆

It’s a brave composer who attempts to write a Requiem nowadays. Those ancient Latin texts still vibrate with meaning, but few actually believe in them. The days when composers could raise an operatic, heaven-storming dim to summon the terrors of the Last Judgement, as Verdi did in his Requiem, are long gone.

Last night we heard a remarkable attempt to create a Requiem for modern times, by leading German composer Wolfgang Rihm. His Requiem-Strophen (“Requiem-Strophes”) were performed at the Lucerne Easter Festival by The Bavarian Radio Symphony Orchestra and Chorus under conductor Mariss Jansons.

To set the mood, we first heard Rihm’s recent short “Gruss-Moment” (“Greeting 2”), a memorial to the firebrand modernist composer Pierre Boulez, who died last year. It unfolded like a series of grave litanies, a mournful woodwind solo on one side answered by harp and brass on the other, sounding like two celebrants in a liturgy. The piece was full of memories: Boulez’s own memorial piece for Bruno Maderna was quoted, and the shadow of Stravinsky’s Requiem Canticles, with its pure sound-world of four flutes and deep harp, lay over everything.

The same mood of hushed remembrance lay over much of Requiem-Strophen. Rihm interspersed the Latin text with more personal meditations, culled from Michelangelo’s gloomy premonitions of his own mortality, and more serene views of the hereafter from German poets. These were sung by the three soloists, who – like all the performers – were superb, showing they really had this angular, sombrely expressive music in their bones (we were hearing a repeat performance, thanks to the generosity of the Siemens Foundation).

The music was not all dark; the two sopranos Mojca Erdmann and Anna Prohaska were sometimes entwined in surprisingly sensuous, almost late-romantic music. That word “almost” is very apt for this piece. Comfortingly familiar harmonies would almost appear, and then retreat back into an atonal mist – an image of death that was striking without being in any way morbid. A sense of quiet awe permeated things. Only the tentative setting of the “Hosanna” misfired, as that can only really be a shout of praise.

At the end, the choir – fabulously precise as always – gave a timid radiance to Hans Stahl’s line “I am slowly leaving the world”, suggesting that the end of this life might not be the end of everything. Rihm’s new piece is deeply felt, and subtly made; let’s hope it comes to the UK soon. IH

The Lucerne Summer Festival runs from 11 August – 10 September. Tickets: www.lucernefestival.ch See the Bavarian Radio Symphony Orchestra under Mariss Jansons at the Barbican London EC2 on April 11 020 7638 4141

Philharmonia/Hrůša/Ryan, Royal Festival Hall, London SE1 ★★★☆☆

Making better musical than grammatical sense, the Philharmonia Orchestra has just appointed not one but two principal guest conductors. Both Jakub Hrusa and Santtu-Matias Rouvali are rising stars of the podium, and by happy coincidence both are conducting the Philharmonia at the Festival Hall this month.

First up was Hrusa with a programme that showed what might be in store for audiences here. But in a less welcome reminder of what is now increasingly likely to become an issue in British musical life, the evening's soloist, violinist Sergey Khachatryan, ran into visa difficulties.

Jumping in at short notice, Julian Rachlin played Tchaikovsky's Violin Concerto, and although he and Hrusa mimed collegial unity it was not the sort of performance one might have hoped for. Rachlin is a posturing player who does a good impression of an old-fashioned star, but his overdone attack, sometimes grainy tone and way of pulling things around made this a performance of gratuitous effects.

The Czech conductor has already made Dvorak's music a speciality, so much so that when he opened the concert with a selection of Brahms's Hungarian Dances he focused only on those ones that Dvorak orchestrated. Hrusa drew warmth and irresistible swagger from the Philharmonia, qualities they also brought together to Dvorak's Eighth Symphony at the end of the concert. Here the slow movement had special radiance, and thanks to fine wind playing the bucolic evocations of the composer's native Bohemia were beautifully vivid.

The latest instalment of the Philharmonia's invaluable early-evening series, Music of Today, was a portrait of the Danish composer Bent Sorensen. One of his best-known works and the piece that opened the programme, The Deserted Churchyards has been described as "a flickering, glittering world… pervaded with memories, wisdom of experience and old dreams".

That could indeed apply to much of his music, certainly to everything heard here; oddly, nothing composed in the last fifteen years was featured. Sorensen's evocative titles always come before any music is written. And just as The Deserted Churchyards is tinged with a morbid melancholy, The Weeping White Room suggests the sighing, scooping effects the composer goes on to achieve.

Everything in these ensembles, including the disembodied voices and tick-tocking percussion, was marshalled with superb lucidity by the conductor Kwame Ryan. But even the sudden changes of texture in Minnelieder — Zweites Minnewater could not dispel the impression Sorensenleaves of being an exquisitely limited composer. JA

Les Fêtes d'Hébé, Britten Theatre, London SW7 ★★☆☆☆

My efforts to understand, let alone, enjoy French baroque opera continue unabated but alas unrewarded. I still find its conventions the most frightful courtly bore, nothing more than a historical relic with which I can make no visceral connection. Oh dear, I know it’s my fault, I’m sorry. 

But at least I’ve had another go with Rameau’s Les Fêtes d’Hébé, receiving its British staged premiere in a co-production between the Royal College of Music, the Académie de l’Opéra national de Paris and the Centre de musique baroque de Versailles.

This is a piece very popular with the élite in its day, first performed at the court of Louis XV in 1739 and revived several times in France during the 20th century. Unlike Italian opera seria, in which the plots are insanely complicated, French baroque opera characteristically has very little plot at all, being closer to the masque tradition that serves primarily to flatter an absolutist monarch or to celebrate a birth or marriage.

Les Fetes d’Hébé opens with a prologue in which the gods’ eponymous cupbearer deserts the shenanigans on Mount Olympus and descends to Planet Earth to observe the behaviour of mortals crossed in love: three half-hour episodes ensue, in which romantic tangles are happily unknotted and the joys of the arts praised. There is very little to it.

The piece belongs in a sub-category known as opéra-ballet, and is as much danced as it is sung. The dances are thumping, vigorous and merry, the song divided between exultant choruses and solo (or occasionally duetted) declamation. It’s the latter that drive me to drink: monotonously tied to a small group of figures, phrases and cadences, it follows only one melodic shape and gives no stamp of individuality to the characters. Think of the varied expressivity of what Bach and Handel were writing at the same time!

A simple staging has been inoffensively devised, directed, designed and choreographed by Thomas Lebrun, with bucolic photographic projections as backdrops and the dances sculpted in a bland modernist idiom, school of Mark Morris. The RCM’s baroque orchestra plays with gusto under Jonathan Williams and there is an excellent choir of French postgraduate students. The soloists – some French, some British, at the same educational level – were good all round but unexceptional: playing two lovelorn maidens, Adriana Gonzalez, pleading laryngitis, ironically seemed to be the best of them. I suspect that substantial cuts had been made, much to my relief. RC

Armonico, St John’s Smith Square ★★★★☆

The Passions of JS Bach are the nearest the great church composer ever got to writing an opera. In fact, Bach’s telling of the story of Christ’s trial and crucifixion has something no opera has, which gives the Passions a special power. There’s a constant to-and-fro between the violent and disorderly story, told in the present tense, and a different, calmer view of the same events seen from eternity’s viewpoint.

Some performances magnify that distance; this one made it smaller, by emphasising the human scale of the drama. Nothing was monumentalised; the music’s dance-like pulse was always evident, and the orchestral sound kept a light airy quality, even at the narrative’s blackest moments. The soloists, apart from Evangelist and Christ, stepped out of the chorus and returned to it, to emphasise the communal nature of the drama.

Not all the voices were equally strong, in fact one or two struggled with Bach’s cruelly angular lines. But several of them shone. Gemma King’s aria in the Trial Scene praising Christ’s sacrifice for mankind had a lovely and appropriately unspotted purity. Bass Andrew Davies' rendition of the famous aria Mache dich, mein Herze, rein (Make yourself pure my heart) was warmly affecting. Most striking of these choral soloists was alto Emma Lewis, who struck a tone of thrilling ripe intensity in her agonised aria Können Tränen.

In the midst of all this stood the tall, spare figure of Ian Bostridge as the Evangelist who tells the story, sometimes in long paragraphs, sometimes in the briefest aside (“then Pilate replied to him”). It’s by far the biggest role, and offers the greatest opportunity for emotional expression, as the Evangelist gets caught up in the story he’s telling. Bostridge, as always, seized every opportunity, even to the extent of making a deliberately ugly sound at times. When he referred to “the treacherous Judas”, he made a sound like a snarl.

This is fine if the chorus snarls too, when it calls for Barabbas to be released, and if the singer playing Christ has a massive calm vocal presence to counteract the hyperintensity. But Andrew Davies didn’t quite have the heft for it, and the chorus were more warmly expressive and compassionate than fierce. So sometimes things became unbalanced, with Bostridge too violently histrionic for what is essentially a modest role. But this was only an occasional problem in this humane and affecting performance. IH

Armonico’s next performance, of Monteverdi’s Vespers, takes place at the Newbury Festival on 19 May 0845 5218 218 www.armonico.org.uk

Michelangelo Quartet, Pierre Boulez Saal, Berlin  ★★★★★

As one of the world’s greatest cultural centres, Berlin has never lacked much in terms of musical provision, at least not since its institutions were reconnected following the fall of the Wall. Now, with the opening of the Pierre Boulez Saal, it lacks even less. This intimate new concert hall may look understated, but it makes several statements at once – unsurprisingly, since it is the brainchild of the polemically driven Daniel Barenboim.

Designed as the public face of the recently established Barenboim-Said Academy – like the West-Eastern Divan Orchestra, an institution focused on Middle Eastern dialogue through music – it forms another part of the pianist-conductor’s musical empire in Berlin. Located behind Barenboim’s Staatsoper Unter den Linden (currently nearing – it is hoped – the end of long-running renovations), the hall occupies an old scenery store of the opera house and its transformation was handled by the architect Frank Gehry and acoustician Yasuhisa Toyota. But it bears no resemblance to the same team’s Disney Hall in Los Angeles, just as it is also the antithesis of Hamburg’s towering new Elbphilharmonie.

The elliptical auditorium fulfils the cherished “salle modulable” ideal of the late arch-modernist composer for whom it is named, a close collaborator of Barenboim. With nearly 700 seats, it is much smaller than the chamber hall of the Berlin Philharmonie, yet it looks set to have further-reaching significance. Operating under the slogan “Music for the Thinking Ear”, the hall eschews the subscription series model and aims to attract fresh audiences. A good space for contemporary music, as befits its name, it is also ideal for chamber ensembles.

This concert by the Michelangelo String Quartet certainly showed off wonderfully alive and transparent acoustics. The textural clarity of Beethoven’s String Quartet Op. 18 No. 1 registered well in a warm and playful performance. Ranging across Austro-Hungary, the programme also featured Bartók’s First Quartet, and several connections were made in a piece that hovers between Wagnerian yearning (the Tristanesque sonorities of the first movement) and earthy folksiness yet also pays tribute to Beethoven’s contrapuntal rigour.

Smetana’s all too seldom heard First Quartet (“My Life”) moved as it should from sunny idealism to the composer’s tragic autobiographical confession of his oncoming deafness. Right from the viola tune that launches it (the Michelangelo line-up includes one of the world’s great viola players, Nobuko Imai), this was a performance of such spirit that the end was truly heart-breaking. JA

More concerts at www.boulezsaal.de