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Ivan Hewett, The Daily Telegraph

Classical concerts are usually sober, sit-up-straight affairs, with just enough light in the darkened hall to peer at the programme. However, these days the immersive phantasmagoria is becoming increasingly popular. The lights are totally dimmed and one piece follows another, blending into an overall “mood”.

As one who prefers lucidity, this new trend for “curated” concerts can be quite annoying. But Friday night’s example of the genre was an utter marvel. 

In the pool of light on stage were just two musicians: Lawrence Power, who has put the mournful viola back in the spotlight, and the gifted Thomas Adès, who accompanied Power at the piano.

The title of their concert, Fairy-Tale Dances, was apt, as several pieces did carry us away to “far away and long ago”. We heard a mournful song by 16th-century composer John Dowland, beautifully played by Power, before Adès joined him for the sequence of variations on that song composed by Benjamin Britten. 

As for those fairy tales, there was the suite Stravinsky extracted from his ballet The Fairy’s Kiss, and Adès’s own Märchentänze (Fairytale Dances), a set of English folk-songs in his own uncannily brilliant arrangements.

The title suggested we might be in for an evening of tweeness. It was anything but, thanks not just to the quality and emotional range of the music but the two wonderful performers, who made all the music stand out in the most vivid colours. 

This was especially true of Stravinsky’s Fairy’s Kiss, in which the composer took little-known pieces of Tchaikovsky and gave them a subtle, quasi-Cubist twist. Power (now playing the violin) threw off the virtuoso leaps with precise savagery, while Adès gleefully emphasised the “wrong notes” that Stravinsky added to Tchaikovsky, in a way that made them seem exactly right.

But the most moving moment came elsewhere. In Luciano Berio’s Naturale, we heard the impassioned song of a Sicilian folk-singer, recorded in 1968, echoed and refracted by Power’s viola and interpreted by dancer Jonathan Goddard. For a moment, the world of fairy tales was pushed aside by the hard light of a Sicilian sun. 

No further performances