Royal Festival Hall, London
The starry Korean pianist’s account of Beethoven’s Fourth Piano Concerto was joyous and compelling, while Gardner made a persuasive case for Tippett’s divisive second symphony

Nearly 30 years after Michael Tippett ’s death aged 93, the composer’s music still divides opinion. Sitting on one side of me during the London Philharmonic Orchestra’s performance of Tippett’s Second Symphony was a man who headbanged appreciatively through the loudest parts. On the other sat a man muttering furiously, who left loudly declaring the performance “a complete waste of time”.

It’s certainly not a symphony on the venerable Beethovenian model. Blocks of material overlap jarringly; the orchestral texture sometimes seems to harbour a rogue agent, as if a musical line has been imported accidentally from another piece; movements end with weird ambivalence. Under the LPO’s principal conductor Edward Gardner , Tippett’s most extravagantly bitonal passages were brash (think multicoloured crazy-paving in sound), the elegiac portions warm and silken. From the incisive chugging of the opening to the finicky busyness elsewhere, Gardner kept this potentially unwieldy score under exquisitely taut control.

Battersea Arts Centre, London
Danielle de Niese took on twinned roles of dancer and singer Anna with great style, the evening introduced by João Barradas’s fiery accordion

The cathedral-like space of Battersea Arts Centre’s Grand Hall, with its high ceilings and distressed walls, is an atmospheric place for the London Philharmonic to decamp to for this performance of The Seven Deadly Sins, the 1933 “sung ballet” that was Kurt Weill and Bertholt Brecht’s last collaboration. That said, prosaically enough it would probably have worked better back home in the Royal Festival Hall. All those unbroken hard surfaces at the BAC make for a cathedral-like acoustic: pitted against a full orchestra, playing with bite and swing for the conductor Edward Gardner, all five singers had to be miked, and the sound system was blunt. Singing the English version by WH Auden and Chester Kallmann, they worked hard but far too much text and nuance got lost.

At least in Danielle de Niese there was a lead who could carry the show regardless. The role of Anna, who travels round the US losing her Louisiana innocence in order to make money for her family back home, was written to be played by two people, a singer and a dancer: de Niese embodied both. Directed by Dominic Dromgoole, and moving between the front of the stage and platforms to the side and back, de Niese seemed also to play the men who commodify Anna – at least with her hands, which she managed to make seem as if they belonged to someone else. The Greed episode saw her working her way cynically round the men of the orchestra, pocketing tips. Her Greek-chorus family included Adam Gilbert’s clear tenor Father and the resonant bass Callum Thorpe as the drag Mother.

Royal Festival Hall, London
Tonight’s Tania León premiere and reconceptualised Szymanowski ballet made a heady combination, with no need for technical trickery

Keen to think outside the box, the London Philharmonic Orchestra is presenting a month-long festival exploring the ways humans experience and express themselves though music. On paper, Dance Reimagined was a bright idea: three works with movement at their heart, including a world premiere from LPO composer-in-residence Tania León and Wayne McGregor’s reinvention of a Szymanowski ballet in collaboration with sculptural designer, film-maker and AI developer Ben Cullen Williams.

Raíces, Spanish for “origins”, is an exploration of León’s heritage which, she explains, is Spanish, Cuban, Chinese and French: “Like a jambalaya.” Opening with wheezy ethereal strings, the music moved in and out of vistas, some urban, one a steamy forest bristling with birdsong. Although there were clear echoes of Latin and jazz, the music was shifty, its syncopations frequently catching the ear off balance. Occasionally pretty but never saccharine, it hinted at mysterious, sun-dappled vistas, holding the attention throughout. Edward Gardner’s definitive beat led a scrupulously prepared performance.