Time Unwrapped
Kings Place, all year
The “Unwrapped” series offers the chance to explore a particular theme, instrument or idea across 50 different concerts spread throughout the year. This year’s theme —Time Unwrapped—has generated one of the most inventive programmes yet, incorporating jazz, storytelling, science, electronic music and plainchant. Haydn’s vivid oratorio The Creation launches the festival, which promises to explore not just time present (with Arcade Fire’s Richard Reed Parry and Arvo Pärt) and time past (concerts by the Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment and works by Monteverdi), but time suspended and even time reversed in a playful and beautifully curated series of events.
Allan Clayton
Wigmore Hall, 9th January
Young British singer Allan Clayton is well on his way to becoming the tenor of his generation, and his startling performance in the title role of Brett Dean’s Hamlet at Glyndebourne proved that he’s just as good an actor as a musician. See this brilliant communicator doing what he does best in this intimate Wigmore recital with pianist James Baillieu. Music by Purcell celebrates the English song tradition, with Schumann’s rhapsodic Kerner Lieder also on the bill.
Simon Rattle, LSO
Barbican, 13th and 14th January
Two concerts over two consecutive nights give a thrilling flavour of the new Rattle regime at the LSO. First the rarely-performed “Genesis Suite,” which unites movements by 20th-century greats including Stravinsky and Schoenberg. On the next night, there Berg’s bittersweet elegy of a violin concerto performed by the peerless Isabelle Faust (below). Add Bartok’s colourful Concerto for Orchestra to the mix, and this sounds unmissable.
