Live at the V&A, Vol. 2

Those inseparable twins, dress and identity, fell under the spotlight of the V&A’s Fashioning Masculinities. The exhibition’s galleries—Undressed, Overdressed and Redressed—informed Oliver Zeffman’s choice of music for the first of his Music x Museums concerts. Recorded live in the V&A’s sublime Raphael Court, the performance opens with Lully’s Overture to Le bourgeois gentilhomme, a nod to the periwigged posturing of 17th-century Paris. Caroline Shaw’s Entr’acte, the American composer’s reimagining of the classical minuet and trio, shows how an old musical fashion can be redressed in elegant new clothing. “It’s so atmospheric, particularly in that breathtakingly beautiful space,” comments Zeffman. The majority of this release is set aside for Stravinsky’s neoclassical ballet Apollo, first performed in 1928 at the Library of Congress in Washington, D.C., and representing here the undressed state. “The point of neoclassicism is to strip away the excesses of Romanticism,” notes the conductor. Its score depicts the Greek god Apollo, rationally minded leader of the muses, in music that combines echoes of Lully with the cool, clean lines of modernism. It’s the perfect programme for a museum that brings old and new together in spectacular ways.