Month: September 2016

1. you have a passing interest in the game of basketball;
2. you see remarkable parallels between the careers of Hakeem Olajuwan and Franz Liszt, Paganini and Dominique Wilkins;
3. you enjoy weird write-ups some readers and editors would have zero faith in, at least at the outset;

The lighting is dusky and subdued. The clothes and staging are straight out of a BBC period drama. The audience chatters and cameras click with a rapidity that would be distracting were it not for the triumphant, churning Reliquary by British composer Ilan Eshkeri.

This is classical music in the 21st century: the soundtrack to a Burberry show. Reliquary is carefully, calculatedly dramatic. There’s no slack and certainly no dourness in the chamber piece. There is, after all, something to be sold here.