A review of two contrasting concerts closing the BBC Proms' Bristol weekend highlighted how the same idea of ritual can produce very different results in performance. Nigel Short's choir Tenebrae marked its 25th anniversary at St George's Bristol with Joby Talbot's Path of Miracles, a piece inspired by the Camino de Santiago pilgrimage, while at Bristol Beacon conductor Sakari Oramo put down his baton to perform György Kurtág's Kafka Fragments on violin alongside soprano Anu Komsi, his wife.

The Talbot piece, commissioned in 2005, immerses the audience with singers moving through the venue, but the reviewer found St George's creaking floors, heat and an audience member fainting disrupted the intended atmosphere, better suited to a cathedral setting. By contrast, Kurtág's 1986 work for violin and voice, drawn from Kafka's diaries and letters into 40 fragments, was performed with calm precision by Komsi and Oramo, who have played it together for almost 40 years; the concert also marked the composer's 100th birthday year.