I’m trying to plug some of the gaps in this blog left by concerts in 2014 that I never got round to reviewing at the time. There are plenty of these and I’m not sure I’ll ever get around to all of them, but it’s got to be worth a try, right?

It seems sensible to start with some of the shows that figured in my list of top 10 concerts of last year. In October I finally caught up with Michael Nyman, a composer who’s been on my radar for many years thanks mainly to his haunting scores for Michael Winterbottom films like Wonderland and Everyday as well as, to a lesser extent, Jane Campion’s The Piano and his work for Peter Greenaway. Rightly or wrongly, I’ve long thought of Nyman as a kind of British version of my favourite contemporary composer Philip Glass – swelling (post) minimalist structures, one foot in art music and the other in popular music, as happy writing soundtracks as he is writing symphonies. It’s an impression that was amply reinforced by his appearance at the Konzerthaus, where he led his eponymous band through a live soundtrack to Eisenstein’s 1925 silent classic Battleship Potemkin.

Now I’m no expert on silent film, but even I could tell that Battleship Potemkin was a significant achievement. I was gripped throughout by the film’s epic scale, its revolutionary editing techniques and its expertly marshalled propaganda message. But what struck me most of all was the people – the sailors, the authority figures, the people in the crowds –all of them intensely human, and all depicted with Eisenstein’s fascinated, unflinching gaze.

As for Nyman’s soundtrack, it was a powerful, headlong rush of a thing. I’m well aware that Nyman is treated with the same kind of sniffiness among the hardcore classical music fraternity that Glass is often subjected to, but I really can’t see the problem when the outcome is as lucid and inventive as this was. Hammering out pattern after bold pattern on the piano, Nyman led his virtuosic band superbly through the momentous events of the film. The uncanny sound of the saxophones, flutes and violins swathed the hall in vibrant textures and swirling, pulsating melodies. The film’s great forces of violence, struggle, treachery, unity and triumph played out hypnotically onscreen against the clashing inevitability of Nyman’s music.

Events took a rather surreal turn at the end of the evening. There had been a solitary heckle of “zu laut im Haus!” at one point during the performance, but I dismissed the uncouth interjection and turned my attention back to the stage and the screen. It was much to my surprise, therefore, that I walked past the mixing desk on my way out and found Nyman’s sound engineer being roundly scolded by a group of elderly female soi-disant musical experts, all falling over themselves to tell the poor guy how it had been far too loud and that their ears were still hurting. Well, boo hoo. Personally I could have done with it being a few notches louder, but the exchange illustrated perfectly why I like Nyman, an establishment figure who gets invited to play at the Konzerthaus but holds no brief for the stifling conventions of the classical music world.

Out in the foyer Nyman was signing autographs, not exactly besieged by well-wishers even though the performance had been well attended. I got my copy of Wonderland signed and related to him the story of what I had just seen. “This should be so much louder,” he replied.