" data-original-title="" title="">Tony Haynes and his comrades, it sits perfectly within the orchestra's progressive dialogue between the musics and diverse histories of this small planet.

Emerging from a conversation between Haynes and epidemiologist Elizabeth Pisani, Song of Contagion is about disease. More importantly, it explores how responses to it are frequently shaped not by need but by social, racial and economic injustices. The Western media's hysterical concern about the Zika Virus resulted from fears that it might affect the 2016 Olympiad. That same media has persistently ignored the far more deadly Dengue virus. Take AIDS or previously Cholera and similar stories unfold.

That this hard-hitting show brought GUO back to Wilton's in London's East End, itself the site of major 19th century Cholera epidemics, seemed rather appropriate. A heavy subject? Of course, it is. Yet, Song of Contagion is serious but never solemn. GUO's music is, as ever, a dynamic collision of musics and rhythms. It is music for movement and dance—and it is music that makes you clench your fist. Bhangra rhythms and the tabla of maestro Yousuf Ali Khan bridged continents on "Song of Cholera" taking the disease from London to Kolkata and other places where it still runs rife. The human voice has a special place in GUO's world and, here, voices from India, Bangladesh, Africa, the Caribbean and Malaysia combined as an aural and visual testament to how we might act together as a species in the face of contagion.

The contrast between the strings, percussion and horns on "Song of HIV" was incredibly effective and affecting. Here, the music built slowly and powerfully with some beautifully plaintive trombone from