Sets of decks featured prominently throughout the night with the inaugural holder

Sets of decks featured prominently throughout the night, with the inaugural holder of the newly introduced Club Global category, Brazil’s DJ Dolores, regaling a capacity crowd for a half-time half-hour with a blend of breakbeats, samba grooves, street-sourced samples and sizzling brass licks. As punk’s buzz-saw guitar became the new orthodoxy, Numan created a sound dominated by the much-maligned synthesiser. With his unfashionable desire to be a star and an avowal of Thatcher’s policies, Numan became an easy figure of ridicule.
Also, Numan’s approach to electronic music lacked finesse. Europe winners Ojos de Brujo, a punk/ carnivalesque ten-piece from Spain, also had one member spinning the discs.Not that softer or folkier approaches were neglected. The Critics’ Award winner Rokia Traore, from Mali, opened with a mesmerisingly sensual, soulfully forlorn ballad, while Uzbekistan’s Sevara Nazarkhan, who took the Asia/Pacific crown, wove a hypnotic spell with her minimally accompanied, undulating vocals. A short film about his life and music cemented the evening’s torch-passing dynamic, before a parade of resplendent young talent took to the stage.The Senegalese trio Daara J, the winners in the Africa category, have reclaimed hip-hop as originating in Africa, and mingle it with traditional chants and resonant a capella harmonies, while retaining the genre’s pugnacious vitality.With the awards’ only criteria for consideration being an artist’s preservation of some dynamic creative relationship with traditional music, the judges displayed a laudable broad-mindedness in interpreting their brief.

The appearance of co-host Benjamin Zephaniah in a kilt celebrated the World Music Awards’ maiden excursion – in their third year – outside London. With a bunch of outr?oung types playing outside on a truck to welcome the crowds as they arrived at Edinburgh’s grande dame of music venues, it was clear from the start that this wasn’t a night for your traditional Radio 3 listener. Voigt gave us four biggies and the inevitable “Zueignung” as her first encore. “Ich liebe dich” was both a declaration and a ringing endorsement of love, while in “Fr?ngsfeier” (“Spring Ceremony”) Voigt’s cries of “Adonis! Adonis!” must have had them calling the fire brigade across the City of London Terrific recital World-class voice.. The warmth of her engagement with these homespun songs showed us the cosier side of Voigt – as did the heartfelt settings of Joyce, Keats and Hardy from her fellow American Ben Moore. I want to hear more of that composer.And all of us wanted to hear more Strauss.

This voice slips so naturally and without affectation into his phraseology. The throat opened, the chords vibrated, the legato was deep, rich and even. In that great song “Ya li v pole da ne travushka byla?” (“Was I not a little blade of grass?”) the sound was completely in style and character, each verse climaxing with an elaborate vocal cadenza on the words: “This must be my fate!” That one phrase alone left me craving to hear her Lisa in The Queen of Spades.From home, Voigt brought quirky Charles Ives, in which the excited little girl at her first opera (“Memories”) was the same little girl who wanted to play Faur? Dolly Suite as her fourth encore. The message was clear: give this lady room.Warming the voice took time A set of Schubert songs, to be precise This is not the repertoire we pay to hear Voigt sing.