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Little Simz & Chineke! Orchestra review – rap-classical crossover is spectacularly realised

Closing out a Simz-curated Meltdown festival, and with a host of star guests helping out, these songs gain extra nuance as orchestra and star meld perfectly together

Orchestra and her own live band, Simz – closing out the 11-day Meltdown festival which she curated this year – performs a set that is equal parts genuine and genius. This extends to word painting: on Introvert, the flutes invoke a choir (“I see sinners in a church”); vibrato strings mimic a voice trembling and breaking on Lonely, the raw, vulnerable track about her internal struggle with producing new album Lotus. For the latter, Wretch emerges from the crowd and walks down through the stalls, clever staging since the song is structured as a phone conversation, forcing the audience to look between the two rappers like watching a tennis match.

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