Wed 17 Dec – Bella Hardy:

I love Bella Hardy's music especially songs like Labyrinth and Herring Girl, but had never had the chance to hear her live until last night when she performed at St Pancras Old Church as part of her 'Christmas Tour'. This is a lovely old church although i wasn't convinced of the acoustics: Bella sounded lovely when she was singing softly but as the volume increased there was a harshness about the sound which made her voice sound more nasal than it should.

The set list was eclectic: favourites like the afore mentioned…

Davod Azad's music seems to be divided between straight forward Iranian/Azerbaijani traditional music and more experimental stuff, such as the poems by the Sufi poet Rumi that he set to music by Johann Sebastian Bach some years ago.

Last night's concert, grandly titled Sat 22 Nov – On the Wings of Global Improvisation fell into the latter category. The master was accompanied by musicians who came from Romany folk, jazz and Indian Classical backgrounds. Some of the improvisations that followed were a bit hit and miss, but when it worked it was superb with the second…

Thu 25 Apr – Stravinsky: Apollon Musagète / Oedipus Rex

Apollon Musagète i could've lived without but Oedipus Rex was amazing: musically and visually, with the soloists half-hidden in the orchestra and soloists and choir alike made up like ghouls. Lighting was used cleverly to add drama to the proceedings but the main thrill came from the power of the music itself which lived up to the myth.

Thu 29 Nov – Beethoven Piano Concerto No 4 / Walton Symphony No 1 First the conductor and then the soloist were forced to withdraw because of illness, but the LSO came through magnificently.

Sir John Eliot Gardiner (one of my musical heroes) took the place of Sir Colin Davis as conductor and a young Korean pianist, Sunwook Kim, stepped in to replace Elisabeth Leonskaja for Beethoven's Piano Concerto No. 4. The latter got a magnificent ovation for his performance but the real surprise to me was the Walton symphony which I hadn't expected to like. The LSO really seemed…

Thu 25 Oct – JALALU-KALVERT NELSON / DOMINIC LASH / ANGHARAD DAVIES / MARK SANDERS

I had no idea what to expect of this gig as i'd never heard of Jalalu-Kalvert Nelson beforehand and he seems to have no discography (just lots of compositions, listed on his website: http://http://www.jalalukalvertnelson.com, which span jazz to western classical music).

He is a trumpeter and also plays a massive (6 foot?) horn, called an Alp Horn. Amazing the sound that he gets out of the latter. I loved his trumpet playing too - unlike some of the avant-garde set his tone is…

Sat 11 Dec – LAST TANGO IN BERLIN: Ute Lemper started off the night by apologising for not being able to make the original date, 20 November, and then gave us our money's worth and a half, just to make sure we knew how sorry she was! I forget how long she performed for but it was a long show.

The programme was a mixture of Brecht, French torch songs and tangos by Astor Piazzolla, joined together with a narrative about a journey from Berlin to Paris to Buenos Aires… and then back again. In fact, i lost…

Mon 24 Jan – Kristin Hersh:

I admit i haven't been keeping abreast of Kristin Hersh's career in recent years (being mostly a fan of her Throwing Muses stuff) so i had no idea she'd even written a book, never mind that she would be reading from it at the gig. Never mind, the book, a memoir based on a diary she kept in her late teens, is a delight as is Kristin's reading of it - at once world-weary, caustic, ironic and at the same time innocent, almost gauche.

Each reading was followed up by a song,…

Sun 31 Jan – The Imagined Village:

I thought that if you had an acoustic guitar / It meant that you were / A protest singer / Oh, i can smile about it now / But at the time it was terrible
(The Smiths)

It began with a protest song. The song, sung by Chris Wood as i recall, concerned the shooting of Jean Charles de Menezes by the Metropolitican Police - an important event, don't misunderstand me, but that doesn't alter the fact that the song was worthy, graceless and endless, as protest songs almost invariably are.

I'd…

Fri 10 Dec – Park Lane Group: Cellophony:

Reminded at half eleven that i'd promised to find something "quirky and interesting" for me and a friend to go to in the afternoon i rushed to the internet and found this free lunchtime concert at St Martin in the Fields. It so happens that i've already bought a ticket to see this all-cello octet at the Purcell Room in January, playing much of the same repertoire, but never mind: you can't get too much cello.

We arrived a quarter an hour before the performance was due to begin and…

Thu 9 Dec – The Unthanks explore and perform the music of Robert Wyatt and Antony & The Johnsons:

A gig of two halves, literally.

The first half saw the Unthanks (formerly known as Rachel Unthank & the Winterset) serenade us with torch songs from the songbook of Antony & the Johnsons: lovely although it did get a bit samey in the end and somehow Rachel and Becky never quite captured the loneliness of the originals (even though i prefer their voices).

The second half was much more varied, mostly, i suppose, because Robert Wyatt's…