Of all the major acts from the the acid house/rave explosion, Leeds's LFO seem least interested in becoming a “heritage act”. Perhaps it's because Mark Bell (the sole member of LFO since the early departure of Gez Varley) has no need to cash in on the brand, thanks to his lucrative “day job” as producer of choice for the likes of Björk and Depeche Mode.
Listening to a recording can never replace the joys of live performance. But if you don’t live in London, opportunities to explore quirky new repertoire can be thin on the ground. CDs most often excel as introductions to composers and works that you’ve never heard before. We’ve all experienced those small moments of rapture when a previously unknown piece bowls you over. You immediately skip back to replay it, usually at higher volume, before you hassle your friends and family to listen too.
Champagne on ice in the private boxes; scarcely any spare seats. This isn’t the normal situation for a concert climaxing in Witold Lutosławski’s Third Symphony, a modernist work whose usual audience is more than two men and a dog but still doesn’t pull in the crowds.
It's not completely unheard of what Sir Simon Rattle did at the start of last night's Prom, where he elided two familiar works - Ligeti's colouristic classic Atmosphères and the Prelude to Act One of Wagner's Lohengrin - into a seamless whole, beating without stopping from one into the other. But it was still pretty breathtaking.
Mozart: Piano Concertos no 6, 8 and 9 Angela Hewitt (piano), Orchestra da Camera di Mantova (Hyperion)
This week we've a glittering, shimmering ballet score with an aquatic theme, and a brilliant British pianist shows off his compositional skills. Plus, in a week where we all need cheering up, 20th-century music's scariest genius shows that he had a fully developed sense of humour.
Sir Simon Rattle's intriguing return to the London Symphony Orchestra podium after years away threw up a curious thought: what happens after Berlin? The fate of six of his eight predecessors at the Berlin Phil has been death on the job. Was last night a first step to finding another way out?
Sir Simon Rattle's clever programming struck again last night, showing us that musical neoclassicism - for want of a better word, which would be something like neo-everything - didn't begin with Stravinsky, whose Apollo ballet is surely his most elevated set of gestures to the past.
Anything anyone else can do, we can do better, seemed the mantra last night. It's probably a bit churlish to accuse the finest orchestra in the world of arrogance - surely that's their job? But the first night of the Berlin Philharmonic's four-day stay in London (yesterday, the Queen Elizabeth Hall, tonight and tomorrow, the Barbican), in which three of the four pieces required conductorless chamber ensembles, did seem decidedly show-offy.