I have to confess, I hadn’t been sure what to expect when I heard about The Art of Fugue staged with acrobats. This latest collaborative experiment in the Southbank Centre’s Multitudes 2026 season – the multi-arts festival with orchestral music at its centre – sounded somewhat counterintuitive; one of the Western canon’s most cerebral works twinned with an extrovert celebration of the human body.

Messiaen’s Turangalîla, his sprawling 10-movement, 75-minute extravaganza, is garish, graphic and glorious. It is a full-bore, Technicolor, over-the-top, spectacular blast of orchestral fireworks from beginning to end. It is, as the kids say, “a lot”. But not enough for the curators of Multitudes, a multi-disciplinary festival at the Southbank Centre this month, who paired the it with a specially-commissioned animated film by 1927 Studios. Bad idea.

Ives’ The Unanswered Question remained unanswered when the BBC Philharmonic and John Storgårds performed it in the Bridgewater Hall in January, but on this occasion, with Thomas Adès, it was followed by Kurtág’s even briefer The Answered Unanswered Question. 

As those of us who were there at what turned out to be his unofficial inaugural concert with the Irish Chamber Orchestra will know, Henning Kraggerud dances, and makes sure his fellow players can follow suit without self-consciousness. His theory is that Mozart must have danced a lot, too; his music certainly does, even as it sings. 

Elgar’s The Dream of Gerontius

The Southbank Centre’s second Multitudes festival – which commissions artists ranging from filmmakers to acrobats to shine new light onto the orchestral repertoire – began last night in triumph with the Aurora Orchestra’s celebrated performance of Stravinsky’s The Rite of Spring from memor

Antonio Pappano’s pairing for last night’s Barbican concert intrigued – and, initially, baffled – me. Shostakovich’s Fifth: a clear choice, given the London Symphony Orchestra’s recent stellar accounts of the Russian’s major symphonies. Its preface, however, came in the unpredictable form of Korngold’s violin concerto, under the bow of the supremely elegant and tasteful Vilde Frang.

The Northern Chamber Orchestra is unusual in that it plays almost always without a conductor. It’s been doing that for nearly 60 years, and there’s a unique frisson to be had from experiencing orchestral music-making done almost entirely through eye contact, careful listening and telepathy, as real chamber music always is.

At the same time, with larger numbers of players and complicated scores, it’s a bit of a high-wire act. Its concert at King’s School Macclesfield was a demonstration of how well it can work and how testing the concept can be.

A concert by the National Youth Orchestra is like no other. For one thing, there are 160 of them – you simply don’t get the kind of power and intensity they can create from a normal-sized orchestra.  

For another, they play with an enthusiasm and eagerness that even the most committed and devoted professionals would find hard to emulate. They want to share their music: they want you to feel it as they do.  And the skill levels are right up there with the best of them, too.

Good Friday and the days before it are times to contemplate Bach's great passions - the St Matthew was performed at the Baden-Baden Easter Festival before I arrived with Klaus Mäkelä conducting the Concertgebouw Orchestra - but not so much another powerful ritual. Britten's War Requiem seared the soul again this Good Friday with the profoundly impressive Joana Mallwitz conducting the Mahler Chamber Orchestra, and it seemed like a masterpiece equal to Bach's.