Philharmonic Hall, Liverpool
Mark Simpson delivers gauzy luminosity and punchy tone in Gavin Higgins’s exquisite new work, conducted with spellbinding pacing by rising star Adam Hickox alongside spirited accounts of Britten and Stravinsky

Twenty years ago, a teenager called Mark Simpson won both the BBC Young Musician of the Year and BBC Proms/Guardian Young Composer of the Year; he commissioned a short piece for clarinet from Gavin Higgins, another young composer. It was Higgins’s first paid work and he promised to thank Simpson by writing him a clarinet concerto. Fast forward two decades: both men have forged award-studded careers, Simpson continues to combine composition and performance – and Higgins has finally delivered that concerto.

Marking the end of Simpson’s tenure as the Royal Liverpool Philharmonic Orchestra’s artist in residence, its premiere featured the kind of intense splashes of musical colour that leave an afterimage. Climaxes came in slow-burn waves and paroxysms of frenetic activity. Simpson’s solo line – sometimes keening, expressive vocalise; sometimes a wild assemblage of rapid blips and riffs – weaved through the shifting orchestral textures, here haloed by muted brass, there soaring over a low hum of gong and double bass. In one exquisite passage, Simpson’s clarinet was a fine, luminous gauze. Elsewhere he punched through the vast orchestral surge through sheer focus of tone. Certain passages seemed haunted by John Adams at his most maximalist, others by Aaron Copland’s celebrated clarinet concerto. But Simpson inhabited the score as a work made to measure, the physicality of this virtuoso performance unmistakable as soloist and orchestra hurtled ecstatically to its close.

Linbury theatre, London
Six fearless singers and the Chroma Ensemble, conducted with arresting immediacy by Naomi Woo, rise to the challenge of the brutal musical onslaughts and anarchic orchestrations of Philip Venables’ raw, imaginative score

Sarah Kane revolutionised British theatre with five provocative plays written between 1995 and 1999. Her final work, 4.48 Psychosis, was her most personal, confronting the clinical depression she struggled with for years. The play was first performed posthumously in 2000, after she died by suicide in 1999.

The Royal Opera and Guildhall School of Music and Drama commissioned Philip Venables to adapt the play as an opera, which debuted in 2016. The composer, also known for a certain “in-yer-face” approach, set Kane’s original text almost entirely, realising its 24 disjointed sections in a raw, imaginative score teeming with minimalist licks, prickly synth-pop and consoling nods to the baroque. The libretto shifts between poetic abstraction and scathing exchanges between a patient and a psychologist. An ensemble of six female singers navigates themes of depression, isolation and the agonising choices surrounding medication.

Hackney Empire, London
Jessica Cale’s soprano is diamond-bright in Elena Langer and Glyn Maxwell’s captivating monologue, while Rebecca Meltzer creates a compelling schoolyard staging of Purcell

English Touring Opera’s autumn season has a mythological theme – which, in practice, means operas about women getting left behind. Touring alongside Gluck’s Orpheus and Eurydice is this compact double bill, pairing Dido and Aeneas with Elena Langer’s Ariadne, a 20-minute scene for soprano setting words by Glyn Maxwell, which was premiered by Almeida Opera in 2002.

Langer’s mini-opera is essentially a monologue, sung persuasively here by Jessica Cale, her powerful soprano diamond-bright. Anna Morrissey’s production, though, has six people on stage: abandonment feels like something active as well as passive. It begins with Theseus leaving, disentangling himself from both the sleeping Ariadne and the red thread that links them, spooling from a heap on the floor – it’s as if he got back from the labyrinth the night before. When Ariadne wakes he’s still there, pacing in the shadows or turning her bed on its rotating platform.

Patricia Kopatchinskaja and Fazil Say
(Alpha)
Compositions by both musicians themselves frame works by Szymanowski and Prokofiev

Patricia Kopatchinskaja and Fazil Say have recorded Say’s music together before, but this is their first recording to feature Kopatchinskaja as a composer as well, but this is no vanity project: Say’s and Kopatchinskaja’s pieces make good complements to Szymanowski’s three Mythes and Prokofiev’s Violin Sonata No 1.

Say’s Lost Screams Sonata is driven by repeated piano rhythms, its fierceness tempered by an episode in which Kopatchinskaja plays low, ghostly harmonics and Say gently plucks the strings of the piano so it almost sounds like a second violin. Kopatchinskaja’s three-movement piece UniSolo is an impish work with a searching, thoughtful playfulness that comes from the parallel world to the Kurtág miniatures she plays so well.

Bertrand Chamayou
(Warner Classics)
The pianist brings a singing quality and seeming effortlessness to the complete set of Songs Without Words

Mendelssohn wrote 48 Songs Without Words for solo piano: eight sets of six, mostly under three minutes long, emerging over a 16-year period that spanned most of his short adult life. The handful that still regularly make their way on to recital programmes are only the tip of the iceberg; the complete set hasn’t been recorded as much as you might think, which makes this new release from Bertrand Chamayou still more welcome.

These pieces belong to the world of Schubert Lieder, and Chamayou brings a singing quality to them from the off. The Duetto that rounds off the Op 38 set is beautifully done, the melodic lines alternating like a female and male voice, each lingering just slightly as the other voice takes over. Compared to other interpreters, Chamayou is often softer-edged, his playing a little smoother and more flowing, although there are exceptions: Op 62 No 6 – known as Spring Song, but originally titled Camberwell Green after the then-elegant London suburb where it was written – is given a perky, almost frothy touch in the accompaniment: spring bubbling under like frogspawn in a pond.

Holywell Music Room, Oxford
A perfect example of the Oxford International Song festival’s creative programming, Benjamin Appl’s unforced but focused recital was full of profoundly beautiful music

Over 25 years, the Oxford International Song festival has adopted a creative approach to programming. Benjamin Appl’s pairing of Schubert lieder with spiny miniatures by György Kurtág was a perfect example. Your Schubert crowd isn’t necessarily your Kurtág crew, and yet the 280-year-old Holywell Music Room was packed to the rafters.

Ellen Mawhinney and Daniel Silcock, one of the festival’s Young Artist duos, kicked things off with an aquatic-themed recital that showed off Mawhinney’s powerful soprano and Silcock’s poetic instincts at the piano. From the inspiriting Scottish ballad Kishmul’s Galley to Hamilton Harty’s impassioned Sea Wrack, their smartly curated 15 minutes paved the way for Appl and James Baillieu’s equally satisfying programme, Lines of Life.

A decade after the premiere of his work setting Kane’s hard-hitting play, it’s returning to the Royal Opera House. The composer remembers its fevered beginnings, the sweat and tears shed along the way, and how it changed his life forever

In January 2015, I was on an overnight flight coming back from New York, having attended Prototype, a festival of new opera. I didn’t sleep a wink, but worked without stopping in a packed, dark, sleepy cabin, reading and annotating a book and furiously making notes on my laptop. As if in a fever dream, my mind whirled with text, music, dramaturgy, theatre.

Those six nocturnal hours were some of the most creatively fertile of my life. The book was 4.48 Psychosis; the annotations became the blueprint for an opera. Sarah Kane’s text had unlocked something in me, a fervour, a deluge of ideas. I could barely keep up, noting every impulse, every fantasy, as my mind pinballed around.

LSO St Luke’s, London
From syncopated funk to the Latin requiem mass, Gregorian chant to bureaucratic recitative, the score to David Önaç new oratorio, premiered by the London Symphony Orchestra, is serious and beautiful

How do you put a value on a human life? If you’re an insurance underwriter that’s not a philosophical question, it’s a practical one. The answer, incidentally, as calculated by Lloyds of London in 1779 was £45: the figure placed on each enslaved person transported across the Atlantic alongside corn, fish and other cargo. Court transcripts from two decades later describe a woman quarantined for smallpox, subsequently bound, blindfolded and tossed overboard tied to a chair. The captain later expressed his regret for the loss of “so good a chair”.

Archives can tell us what, but it takes art to give us the human how of the past. Enter composer David Önaç – commissioned to take the historical documents unearthed from the Lloyds archive and give them howling, raging life in his new Atlantic Requiem, premiered this weekend by the London Symphony Orchestra, an expanded BBC Singers, three soloists and (in a last-minute step-in) conductor Malcolm J Merriweather.

Queen Elizabeth Hall, London
Bizet’s incidental music for Daudet’s 1872 play The Girl from Arles was given its first UK complete performance by Sir Mark Elder, the Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment and strong soloists in Jeremy Sams’ staging

‘The prettiest music in the world” was how the playwright Alphonse Daudet described the incidental music Bizet composed for his 1872 play The Girl from Arles – which is a bit like describing Carmen, the opera Bizet would compose less than three years later, as a charming little love story.

Daudet’s play initially flopped but was saved by the music Bizet wrote for it, which comprises 27 separate numbers ranging from string whispers a few bars long to full-blown orchestral entr’actes and celebratory choruses. Two orchestral Suites from L’Arlésienne have long been familiar in the concert hall. But, after more than 150 years, this was the first chance for UK audiences to hear the complete incidental music in its proper context. Presented by the Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment and conducted by Mark Elder, there was a danger this play with music could turn into music with a play – but in fact the two elements complemented each other at equal strength.

The long-running series in which readers answer other readers’ questions on subjects ranging from trivial flights of fancy to profound scientific and philosophical concepts

• This week’s question: Why is a child saying ‘Na-na, na-na-na!’ so annoying?

Why are national anthems almost always orchestral? When – and by whom – was it decided that brass and strings best represent a country’s identity? Where are the power-pop or folk varieties? Ross Gomes, by email

Send new questions to nq@theguardian.com.

The choir leader and presenter on not fitting in at his all-boys grammar, how synthesisers changed everything, and his ‘dithering’ start on TV

Born in London in 1975, Gareth Malone is a choirmaster and broadcaster. He began his career running youth and community choirs for the London Symphony Orchestra and first appeared on TV in 2006’s The Choir. He has since created choirs with Leicester schoolboys, Aylesbury prisoners, as well as the Military Wives, which produced the No 1 single, Wherever You Are. He lives in London with his wife and three children. His new live show, Sing-A-Long-A-Gareth: At the Movies, is on tour across the UK this autumn.

I was 15 and just coming into my own with my confidence, as you can tell by the double denim and the pose. The photo would have been taken at a party at my parents’ house in Bournemouth. When I wasn’t filling up guests’ drinks, I’d be playing some songs – it looks like I’m playing B flat major, so I suspect at this very moment it was Hey Jude.

Leeds Grand theatre
Patrick Nolan’s thoughtful staging for Opera North shifts Pushkin’s story forward to explore the transition from Soviet state to elitist excess

For an opera rooted in 19th-century Russian romanticism it’s surprising how effortlessly Eugene Onegin can be brought up to date. Patrick Nolan’s thoughtful staging for Opera North, a co-production with Irish National Opera and his own Opera Queensland, manages to capture the aching melancholy of Pushkin’s original while reflecting on the equally gloomy transition from the Brezhnev-era Soviet state to the reckless excess of the pre-Putin oligarchy.

For Tatyana and Onegin, Tchaikovsky’s opera is a case of the road not taken, subtly reflected in the gently elasticated timeframe adopted here. In Act I, Leslie Travers’ crumbling civic gymnasium is commandeered to rehearse a pageant in praise of Soviet agricultural policy. When Madame Larina and the housekeeper Filipyevna chatter on about times past, Lenin-emblazoned flags remind us they would have grown up in the shadow of Stalin. As the gaudy tracksuits and 80s bling (costume designer Elizabeth Gadsby having a field day) of Act II give way to formal evening wear and diamonds in the final act, it feels as though an entire way of life has been swept away, and with it any chance to correct the mistakes of the past.

David Önaç uses insurance documents for work funded by Lloyd’s of London after research uncovered its slavery links

A centuries-old insurance document detailing the trafficking of enslaved Africans began with the words: “In the name of God, Amen.”

For Dr Errol Francis, the artistic director and chief executive of the arts and heritage charity Culture&, the contradiction was striking: an invocation of God in a document that treated human beings as cargo.

Frankfurt Radio Symphony/Altinoglu
(Alpha)
Conductor Alain Altinoglu brings weight and purpose while the instrumental solos are piquant and precise.

If the Leningrad was Shostakovich’s official response to the second world war, the Eighth Symphony was his answer to the question: “Will you tell us what you really think?” Written while the fighting was still under way, its immediacy remains striking today, a quality reflected in Alain Altinoglu’s purposeful interpretation with the Frankfurt Radio Symphony orchestra.

You hear that directness at once in the way the strings dig deep, bringing remarkable colours to a 26-minute Adagio that, in the wrong hands, can sound merely bleak and black. Not that Altinoglu shuns the horrors: his phrasing and textural dynamics bring fearsome weight and a sense of wide-eyed terror to the composer’s protracted cry of despair. The orchestra covers itself in glory with instrumental solos that are piquant and precise. Resonant details are captured by an outstanding German production team that manages to outdo the Berlin Philharmonic’s excellent 2020 account under Kirill Petrenko (Shostakovich fans will need both).

Susan Tomes
(Hyperion)
From Marianne Martines – taught by the family lodger, Haydn, to Teresa Carreño who played for Lincoln, there’s names new and old in this fascinating and appealing collection

This attractive compilation came out of Susan Tomes’ research for a book on female pianists across history. As she discovered, many wrote music as well, producing short works for the salons and domestic circles to which they were frequently restricted. Thanks to pioneering performers such as Tomes, some of the dozen women presented here are familiar names, but several will be new to many, as will their appealing compositions.

Take Marianne Martines, given lessons in lieu of rent by the family lodger, Haydn. Her miniature A major sonata possesses the sparkle of Scarlatti. Marianna von Auenbrugger died aged 23, but she was taught by Salieri, who paid for the publication of the Mozartian E-flat major sonata recorded here.

One hundred years since the BBC first broadcast choral evensong, MP and former chorister Jonathan Davies hymns a beautiful and empowering collective experience that we should praise – and protect

Some sounds seem to belong to Britain. The peal of church bells. The brass band on a village green. The roar of a football crowd. And, heard from a cathedral at the end of the day, the extraordinary sound of a choir singing evensong.

This year marks the centenary of choral evensong on BBC radio. On 7 October 1926, when the BBC was in its infancy, listeners heard a live service broadcast from Westminster Abbey. A century later, evensong can still be heard on Radio 3 every week from cathedrals, churches, chapels and abbeys across the country. It is the BBC’s longest running outside broadcast and reaches hundreds of thousands of people every week.

This week, from Reich to Kendall and Celibidache, three musicians who prove there is no such thing as “pure music”, whether we’re talking about a technique, a mode of musical expression or a musician’s legacy.

Steve Reich turned 90 on Saturday, and I’ve been thinking about his early tape pieces from the mid-1960s, It’s Gonna Rain and Come Out. They’re such vital works not only because they opened his imagination to what could happen if you made a micro-canon – playing the same material slightly faster or slower – which is what happened when one of his tape machines slipped out of sync with the other: it’s that these are human voices that Reich is setting. It’s Gonna Rain is made from the voice of Brother Walter, a Pentecostal street preacher in San Francisco, whose warning of apocalypse in 1965 Reich recorded and looped against itself, over and over, so that Brother Walter’s voice becomes a wall and wail of sound, a sonic realisation of the sublime inundation he’s announcing. Come Out was made in 1966 with the voice of Daniel Hamm, one of the Harlem Six, six black men wrongly convicted of first-degree murder in New York. Reich’s piece was commissioned for a benefit event for their legal costs as “background music for passing the hat”.

These pieces don’t just set words, Reich says they “set human beings”, using the vocal recordings not only as musical material but political inspiration and emotional expression. Techniques that are seemingly all about narrowly musical processes – looping, canon-ing, fugue-ing – are embedded in the facts of where they were made and how, and whose voices are being represented by whom.

The legendary conductor was acclaimed for his dazzling music-making, and infamous for his hatred of recordings. His son, writer of a new film about him, remembers a loving yet intransigent and demanding father

My father, Sergiu Celibidache, loved children more than anything because they are free and true to themselves. And yet, he once made a young boy wet himself when he dared to ask for an autograph, shouting at the poor child as if he had committed a federal crime because he knew there was a black market selling his signature behind his back.

I grew up a privileged child with presents from all around the world. I was spoiled – to the despair of my mother, who always tried to keep my feet on the ground. But the gifts were part of my father’s way of making up for his long absences – he was often away touring with his orchestras.

Milton Court, London
A contemporary piece by David Fennessy is framed by JS Bach and Arvo Pärt in a show characterised by uncanny sounds and ghostly chorales

It’s not every day a concert promises “Bach & Blood”, nor delivers it so thoroughly. There were no massacres from the Scottish Ensemble, mercifully, just a characteristically singular bit of programming from this ever-adventurous string orchestra that framed Irish composer David Fennessy’s 2024 Blood with music by Bach and Arvo Pärt.

On 7 July 1720, while JS Bach was away in Carlsbad, his wife Maria Barbara died suddenly, buried before he could return. She was just 35. “Sei solo” – you are alone – the composer wrote at the top of his collection of Sonatas and Partitas for Solo Violin completed soon after. A slip of pen, misspelling “Sei Soli” (six solos), or a deliberate play on words? The intensity of the works – particularly the monumental 15-minute D minor Chaconne, with its weeping chromatic theme – suggest the latter.