Anne-Sophie Mutter/Tilson Thomas/LSO, Barbican Hall, London<br></br>Sainsbury's Choir of the Year, The Lowry, Salford

Berg: body, brain and soul

With the exception of centenaries, opportunities to hear the major works of a composer as "difficult" as Alban Berg within a few short months are rare. This year – by which I mean the calendar year rather than music's quasi-academic season – we have been lucky. In May there was Richard Jones's bright, brutal staging of Lulu for English National Opera. Last month saw the all-too-brief run of Keith Warner's nihilistic dissection of Wozzeck at Covent Garden. This week it was Berg's Violin Concerto; performed by Anne-Sophie Mutter and the London Symphony Orchestra on two successive nights at the Barbican as part of conductor Michael Tilson Thomas's Last Works season.

Berg's untimely death at the age of 50 has been described as "the most regrettable single event in 20th-century music". It's a statement with which, having heard Mutter's near-definitive account, it is impossible to disagree; not least because this elegiac concerto – finished barely four months before his death and written in memory of young Manon Gropius – makes you long to hear what Lulu might have become had Berg finished its third act and revised the first two to the level of Wozzeck. The difference between Lulu and the concerto is not merely that of theatre versus concert hall – though the purity Berg achieved in his instrumental writing never translated to opera or song – it is the difference between suggestion and statement. Put bluntly, this is a work that does what it sets out to do without distraction or dilution.

Mutter has, of course, performed the Berg before, though not, I think, like this; with as pure a concentrate of philosophy and feeling as I've heard from any instrumentalist. Maybe it comes down to age and experience as much as the match of musician to material, but I suspect that this work cannot sing with conviction unless the soloist has been a child – not that common an experience among violin prodigies – has been a lover and, crucially, a parent. Mutter's caramelised castrato sound – so distractingly denatured and over-muscular in Mozart and Dvorak – and utter seriousness of engagement could not find a better cause than this. At long last her formidable technique and intellect have been joined by formidable emotional involvement, and her Berg rivals Lorraine Hunt Lieberson's Bach, so rich is the mix of body, brain and soul.

From Tilson Thomas too, the performance was unusually honest; clean and clear across the minute shades of misery and regret, the outraged shriek of pain at the start of the Allegro, and the downy, dove-gray, fragmentary consolation of the chorale "Es ist genug". The LSO likewise excelled themselves in meeting the chamber-music demands of Berg's symphonic score; daring, immediate, sensitive and responsive. If Mutter was thinking and playing long, they provided the foot-notes to her argument, only coming to soloistic fore in Shostakovich's caustic, cynical Fifteenth Symphony; a work that proves that nine symphonies are quite enough from almost any composer, thank you very much, and that technically faultless and utterly heartless is very, very hard to swallow after technically faultless and utterly sincere.

If sincerity is one of the buzziest bees in my bonnet, the still-low profile of women composers and conductors is another. Ruth Crawford Seeger's spacious, considered Andante for Strings, performed alongside the Berg, begs the question why her music – her non-folk music, that is – is so rarely programmed? Would Crawford Seeger be better known if there were more female conductors, I wonder, and why are these conductors so rarely seen?

At the finals of the children's and youth choir sections of Sainsbury's Choir of the Year at The Lowry, the ratios of female to male conductors were, respectively, 5-1 and 2-4. Understandable, I suppose, but startlingly at odds with the gender ratio in professional adult music-making. And so, since four other judges and I spent most of last Saturday assessing the merits of these sometimes fabulous choirs, I'd like to take this opportunity to mention three incredibly talented women who might never make an international career themselves but are working very hard to make that at least a possibility for their pupils: Catherine Morley of Priory Primary School, Slough, Sally Chappell of Headington Junior School, Oxford, and Ruth McCartney of the Methodist College, Belfast.

McCartney's choir's electrifying account of Nigel Osborne's Songs from a Bare Mountain was one of those moments where preconceptions about contemporary music are made redundant. To grip an audience sated on cutely-choreographed renditions of Cy Coleman's Rhythm of Life with a chilling work that conjures the microtones of Bulgaria is truly inspiring – the sense of achievement among the girls who had grappled to gain understanding and ownership of Osborne's work was tangible – and, I would argue, truly vital to the musical future of this country. Though McCartney will be the only one to take her choir on to next week's Grand Final, each of these women is doing remarkable work in terms of encouraging musical responsiveness, technical accuracy, narrative understanding and imagination among the young. I doubt it will happen, but there's many a martinet maestro who could learn something about trust and communication from a trip to Belfast, Slough or Oxford. Gentlemen, it's over to you.

a.picard@independent.co.uk