Crouch End Festival Chorus, Barbican, London<br></br>New London Consort, Queen Elizabeth Hall, London<br></br>Concordia/Robin Blaze, Wigmore Hall, London

Crouch End Festival Chorus, Barbican, London

While other choral societies still perpetrate Handel's Messiah at this time of year, David Temple's ever-enterprising Crouch End Festival Chorus went about its own business on Saturday with a programme nattily entitled "Tango Clasico!", and attracted a good crowd.

Constant Lambert's The Rio Grande opened proceedings. The Barbican platform's modest size caused the young London Orchestra da Camera's percussion section to spend much of the evening exposing themselves near the front; their leader had an invisible solo behind the piano in the Lambert, as well as being uncredited in the programme. Both singing and playing, while admirably clean, were a bit British and well-behaved. Elizabeth Shepherd, the choir's accompanist, dispatched the solo piano part without much Latin brio. In an arrangement for piano, bandoneón and orchestra of Astor Piazzolla's Libertango, the bandoneón player, Hector Ulises Passarella, showed how these things should be done.

In Misa Tango by Luis Bacalov (who also arranged the Piazzolla and was present at this concert), Passarella was, by British stiff-upper-lip standards, indulgently effusive, supplying a body gesture for practically every semiquaver. That seemed about right for this 68-year-old Argentinian-Jewish composer's setting of parts of the Mass in Spanish, which was written in 1997 and here received its British premiere. The bandoneón is joined by two solo singers – the mezzo Emma Selway (who also had a small role in the Lambert) and the baritone Nicholas Garrett – as well as the choir. All doubtless enjoyed themselves in this overlong, rather anonymous-sounding Latin-style amalgam; but only the (again uncredited) solo cellist, who also had a prominent part, rose fully to its tackiness.

The most individual and moving music of the evening came with the British premiere of Philip Glass's Itaipú. The title means "singing stone", and the work's four continuous movements set texts based on the Guaraní Indians' creation myth surrounding the Paraná river, which flows between Brazil and Paraguay. Inspired by the hydroelectric dam on the river, which the composer visited before this huge structure's completion, this work for chorus and orchestra expertly spices the style of his opera Akhnaten with the Latin-American idioms characteristic of his approach in the late 1980s, when the work was written.

The result is some of Glass's best music of the last two decades, particularly effective in the climax of its later stages, when constant metric dislocation meets some audacious chromatic shifting in an incantatory slow burn of magnificent proportions. The Crouch Enders aren't a perfect choir and, like most, suffer from a dearth of power in the men's department. But these singers rose to many of the challenges of this composer's highly effective writing for massed voices. What a pity that the magical conclusion was spoilt by some idiot applauding too soon.

Keith Potter

New London Consort, Queen Elizabeth Hall, London

Philip Pickett, the ingenious director of the New London Consort, once published an essay surveying the problems of constructing coherent and appealing concert programmes out of the miscellany of mostly brief secular pieces that have come down from the Middle Ages and Renaissance, under the admonitory heading "Hard-Sell, Scholarship and Silly Titles".

Not that the title of the New London Consort's latest outing, The Field of Cloth of Gold, could be dismissed as silly in any sense; for while the specific music performed at that fabulously extravagant and fruitless diplomatic beano of 1520 is unknown, there remains plenty of evidence about the varied court repertoires of its principal participants, Henry VIII of England and François I of France. But it was a title Pickett had invoked before – in August 1988, in fact, when much the same programme was presented in the same venue by many of the same performers.

And, behind that, one sensed a yearning to reach further back across a decade of more soberly purist early music events to the crowd-pulling 1960s showmanship of David Munrow with his funfair of period instruments. For here, arrayed across the stage of the Queen Elizabeth Hall, were 20 singers and players of trumpets, cornetts, shawms and sackbuts (the ancestors of the oboe and trombone), recorders, lutes, sundry keyboard instruments, viol and drums – only bagpipes were missing from the ensemble this time round.

As before, the programme was divided between French and English halves, with Pickett pushing rapidly on from item to item to keep up a continual ear-tickling turnover of vocal and instrumental line-up. As before, some neat programming revealed that certain apparently distinct pieces were in fact reworkings – that "Pastyme with Good Cumpanye", supposedly by Henry VIII himself, for instance, was a mere rip-off of a partsong entitled "Helas Madame".

Yet for all the multicoloured razzmatazz, from the opening Susato-style fanfare, to the concluding build-up of William Cornysh's "Blow Thi Horne, Hunter", the evening's most memorable moments were its quietest: when Sharona Joshua sat at the harpsichord to play A Hornpype by Hugh Aston – that remarkable pre-echo of the later Elizabethan virginalists – and David Roblou delivered a Pavane and Gaillarde by Pierre Attaingnant on an even more slender-toned virginals.

There was something curiously touching about an entire hall of performers and listeners concentrating intensely upon these tiny sounds, though one doubts whether any equivalent epiphany graced the Field of Cloth of Gold.

Bayan Northcott

Concordia/Robin Blaze, Wigmore Hall, London

This coming May sees the 400th anniversary of the birth of one of Britain's most striking composers – although as recently as half a century ago, few would have recognised William Lawes as such. Only since then have scholars and performers gradually disinterred from the archives a full range of the consort and vocal music, which was composed, in all its richness and strangeness, over a mere couple of decades by this loyal servant (unto death) of Charles I.

Just how rich and strange was immediately manifest in an exceptionally cogent concert devised by Mark Levy, leader of that accomplished viol consort Concordia, for the opening evening of their Lawes anniversary series at the Wigmore Hall.

Dispensing with the kind of verse-readings from the period, lecturettes on "historical background" and whatnot that are all too usual in such programmes, this one made its points entirely musically. The matching of consort music and vocal settings by Lawes with equivalent pieces by his great predecessor, William Byrd, and successor, Henry Purcell, positively dramatised the contrast between their settled mastery and his passionate, almost experimental daring.

Three of Lawes's Setts, or suites, for six viols with chamber organ continuo provided the programme's spine: music alternately of volatile feeling and fathomless sonority. Compared with the down-to-earth logic of Byrd's Fantasy a 6 in G minor, or the elegant partwriting of Purcell's Fantasy on one note, Concordia's account of the opening Fantazy from Lawes's Sett a 6 in F major luxuriated in his propensity to dissolve counterpoint into sheer texture, emphasising the chiming interference patterns between parts – in this instance, majestic chains of descending thirds – just as their reading of the second Fantazy in the same Sett made the most of its almost bar-by-bar shifts of mood and unaccountable final switch from ebullience to tragedy.

For the vocal items, various members of Concordia were joined by that seraphic countertenor Robin Blaze. Here, in comparison with, especially, Purcell's infallible ear for English word-setting, Lawes's efforts occasionally sounded a mite awkward – in his canticle "When Man for Sin Thy Judgement Feels", for instance.

And though Blaze found a searing conviction in its refrain, his serene radiance in Purcell's "An Evening Hymn" was quite something else. All the same, the next Lawes concert on 24 January, in which Concordia are joined by Emma Kirkby, is absolutely not to be missed.

Bayan Northcott

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