Kate Royal | Claire Booth | Hugh Cutting Christopher Purves | BBC Singers | Halle Choirs| BBC Philharmonic | Ben Gernon | Vimbayi Kaziboni - Emily Howard: The Anvil

The imagined sounds of mass protest run through composer Emily Howard's and poet Michael Symmons Roberts's The Anvil, commissioned by BBC Radio 3 and the Manchester International Festival to mark the bicentenary of the 1819 Peterloo massacre, in which crowds protesting for universal suffrage in St Peter's Fields, Manchester, were brutally crushed. To a solo soprano who narrates and remembers and a baritone who seems caught in the action, the work adds the immense forces of four choirs - each given music tailored to its particular capabilities, from professional to amateur - and the BBC Philharmonic to ask: what future was being forged in the tragic events that took place that day? A second collaboration between Howard and Symmons Roberts, Elliptics, is quieter, more elegiac: a meditation on love and death, and on what we hope