In the Alps

"An animated concert" is composer Richard Ayres's own description of No 42, In the Alps, a work for soprano, trumpet and orchestra that, like so much of his output, seems to thumb its nose at the buttoned-up conventions of contemporary music while creating an unnervingly charming world of its own. Ayres uses a mix of film captions, singing and music to tell the story of a girl who survives a plane crash on a remote Alpine peak, and is taught to sing by the local animals. Eventually, her singing attracts the attention of Bobli, a mute boy who lives in the valley below and can only communicate through his trumpet playing, and he sets off to find her. With the soprano Barbara Hannigan in Heidi dirndl and plaits, the trumpeter Alastair Mackie sporting fine lederhosen and the conductor Martyn Brabbins donning rucksack and walking boots, this UK premiere was a bit like The Sound of Music reworked by Mauricio Kagel. But Ayres's music, with its artful mix of animal sounds and fractured parodies of Rossini and Richard Strauss, lacks Kagel's critical distance from what he is satirising. It isn't an affectation but a private fantasy, like fairies at the bottom of the garden, which Ayres insists we take at face value. Without the fancy dress, Brabbins and the Sinfonietta, with the bass Stephen Richardson, also gave the London premiere of Gerald Barry's Beethoven. A setting of an English translation of Beethoven's only surviving love letter – to his famous Immortal Beloved – it is part patter song, part metrical psalm, with the ensemble providing dislocated Stravinskyan accompaniments and, finally, a richly scored version of the carol Adeste Fideles. Not quite as zany as the Ayres, perhaps, but it was quirky and baffling enough.