It’s over 50 years since Brian Eno final strutted onstage with Roxy Music, however there’s clearly nonetheless a few of that preening peacock in him: for the primary half of tonight’s set (his second of the night time) Eno stands beneath a highlight carrying a vibrant pink shirt.

The black-clad figures surrounding him are the Baltic Sea Philharmonic, led by enigmatic, energetic (“demented”, as Eno places it) conductor Kristjan Järvi. It’s straightforward to see why a ‘sequence of reveals’ (don’t name it a tour) in collaboration with them can be interesting for Eno (moreover, that’s, from the fee from La Biennale di Venezia). They flip the thought of an orchestra on its head, however in a really completely different approach to, say, the Portsmouth Sinfonia: in the course of the set, they transfer across the stage, semi-dancing, with none want for musical scores, violinists and flautists transferring in direction of centre-stage once they play a distinguished half. At different factors, all of them sing collectively, or make a wide range of vocal noises into the radio mics clipped to their devices.

The primary half of the set is a efficiency of Eno’s 2016 album The Ship, newly reissued on remastered, ‘coke bottle inexperienced’ vinyl. It’s certainly one of his most interesting data, and this dwell iteration expands it to new, richer depths – the unique album now appears a little bit like a sparse define for this new spectacular. The sounds the Baltic Sea Philharmonic make are droning and highly effective, at occasions ethereal, at others crushingly dense and heavy, and whereas a few of Eno’s closest musical collaborators are right here too – together with programmer and keyboardist Peter Chilvers and guitarist Leo Abrahams – it’s splendidly difficult to differentiate between their contributions and people of the orchestra. Regardless of a chilly, Eno’s in high quality (generally processed) voice, at occasions even singing with a little bit of the deranged grandeur of latter-day Scott Walker.

That is severe stuff, pertaining to warfare and AI, however the temper modifications after it ends, when the group are lastly in a position to clap and Eno can converse. There are jokes! It’s nice to be again on the Competition Corridor, he says, he hasn’t performed right here for “oh, about an hour and a half”. We then get a beautiful “By This River” from 1977’s Earlier than And After Science, with harp changing the electrical piano of the unique; then a moody, starlit “Who Provides A Thought” from final yr’s Foreverandevernomore, earlier than “And Then So Clear”, taken from 2005’s One other Day On Earth. The idea is nicely thought-out: The Ship, One other Day On Earth and Foreverandevernomore all belong to a selected pressure of Eno’s work, colliding song-form and ambient music. Maybe One other Inexperienced World does too, however we hear nothing from that.

The encore takes us again to darker issues: One other Day On Earth’s “Bone Bomb”, impressed by an aspiring Palestinian suicide bomber and an Israeli medic treating the victims, is adopted by an impassioned speech on the raging Israel-Hamas battle. After urging the viewers to affix the decision for a ceasefire, Eno – his voice catching with emotion, or maybe it’s simply the chilly he’s struggling with – tells us that a lot of the earnings from the night can be going to the charity Medical Help For Palestinians.

They finish with one other two songs from Foreverandevernomore, each radically rearranged and reimagined, earlier than a prolonged standing ovation and a variety of curtain calls. It’s been an hour and a half, nevertheless it feels loads shorter. For a person who’s spent his life presenting his experiments, this seems like one of the profitable.