Hackney Empire, London
Gabriel Prokofiev’s avant garde record label marked its 20th birthday with an engaging and energetic scaled up showcase

Even seasoned aficionados of avant-garde music are unlikely to have witnessed a musician playing a mini concerto for bubble wrap. But that’s what the composer Tonia Ko is playing tonight. She’s at the front of the stage, miked up, rhythmically rubbing and rustling various sizes of plastic packaging while the string section of the London Symphony Orchestra play a suitably squeaky and discordant accompaniment. During a rubato-heavy “solo”, where she crunches some small-gauge bubble wrap and then “pops” a particularly large variety of industrial packaging, she even elicits applause.

This kind of thing is par for the course with Nonclassical, a series of sporadic club nights launched in 2004 by Gabriel Prokofiev. The grandson of the Russian composer Sergei and a fascinating orchestral composer in his own right, Gabriel also played punk-funk with the band Spektrum, made electronica under the pseudonym Medasyn and provided grimy production for the rapper Lady Sovereign, and he wanted to bring some of that demotic energy to the “contemporary classical” world, taking it out of the conservatoire and the concert hall. His Nonclassical sessions took place in unprepossessing pubs such as the Shacklewell Arms in Dalston or the Macbeth in Hoxton, where you’d nurse a pint of Guinness while string quartets played computer game music or Guildhall students made space-age sonatas on theremins.