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Prom 50: Orchestre de Paris/Harding review – barnstorming Babylon is baffling but fun

Royal Albert Hall, London
 Jörg Widmann’s Babylon Suite is anarchic but infectiously enjoyable, framed here by pristine Beethoven and Schumann

Jörg Widmann’s opera Babylon, a bombastic, Stockhausen-baiting mix of myth, spirituality, human sacrifice and singing genitalia, had its premiere in Munich seven years ago. It has yet to be staged in the UK; until then we have to make do with his Babylon Suite, already heard in Cardiff and Birmingham. This performance by the Orchestre de Paris and its outgoing music director Daniel Harding was its first in London.

It’s a barnstormer of a piece, wheeling through music from the opera in an unbroken 30-minute work for a huge kitchen-sink orchestra but no singers. Initially, the music grows swiftly from a single accordion line into a layered, chaotic whirl. It’s the kind of opening passage that promises cataclysm – and that’s what we get, although not in the brutal way we might anticipate.

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