Philharmonia/Hazlewood | Classical review

Queen Elizabeth Hall, LondonAlan Hovhaness is one of the most enigmatic of 20th-century American music mavericks. He was prolific – over 400 works, including 67 symphonies – but until Richard Thompson included Hovhaness's music in his Meltdown programme, he had never been performed at the Southbank Centre.Hovhaness, who died in 2000, was of Armenian descent, and after the second world war his music began to take on ideas from the Middle East and east Asia, as two of the pieces played by the...

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