London Philharmonic Orchestra: Belshazzar's Feast

This is British music with serious attitude. In Leeds, in October 1931 William Walton took a huge choir and a giant symphony orchestra, added a couple of brass bands, and knocked his audience backwards. Belshazzar’s Feast is definitely not your average oratorio: big, brassy and shamelessly pagan, it caused a scandal back then, and it can still set hairs on end today.

But then, music in this Isle of Noises has always been more emotional than you might think – and if anyone can find the tender soul of Elgar’s Enigma Variations, or the raw melancholy of Butterworth’s A Shropshire Lad, it’s that unrivalled American Anglophile Marin Alsop.