You won’t see two more contrasting shows this year than Corinne Bailey Rae performing her album Black Rainbows and Brian Eno presenting work with a symphony orchestra. One had music that did everything; one had music that did very little. But both were overwhelming and filled with joy of rather different kinds.

When Bailey Rae last made an album, in 2016, it was gentle, tasteful, soulful R&B, the kind the young professional couple in a prestige Netflix drama listen to before their lives are overturned by a vengeful nanny. Black Rainbows,by contrast, from earlier this year, was an abrupt embrace of everything: from scuzzy garage punk to psychedelic soul to American show tunes, all inspired by the Stony Island Arts Bank in Chicago and its exhibits on the black experience in America. Black Rainbows was the album the young bohemian couple in a prestige Netflix drama listen to before their lives are overturned by a distracting bartender.

If that sounds a bit worthy, a bit eat-your-greens, it really wasn’t. Bailey Rae is magnetic, with a wondrous voice, and she explained the purpose of each song, which brought them all to life. ‘He Will Follow You With His Eyes’ was written after looking at the adverts for cosmetics in the black magazine Ebony. ‘New York Transit Queen’ was inspired by a picture of 17-year-old Audrey Smaltz hanging off the back of a streetcar. ‘Peach Velvet Sky’ imagined the tiny circle of sky Harriet Jacobs could see through a knot in the wood as she hid from slavery in her grandmother’s crawlspace (this one is also the loveliest on the record, something that might have come from one of the great American musicals).

The band were hypnotic, especially drummer Myke Wilson, who appeared to be playing to a rhythm track in his head, depositing his fills into unexpected places and pulling them into unexpected shapes. Perhaps ‘Put It Down’ and ‘Earthlings’, extended into danceathons, went on too long. With no live bass in the band, they didn’t quite have the percussive thwump in the chest one craves. But those are cavils. It was a spellbinding performance of a career-defining record.

Brian Eno doesn’t play live very much. There was a run of shows in Brighton in 2010 and some at the Riverside Studios in 1986. But before then you have to go back to 1974 for anything other than special events. At the Festival Hall he didn’t play at all. He had the Baltic Sea Philharmonic to do that. He stood near the back of the stage, intoning. Thankfully – he has been a regular guest on the Let’s Talk It Over podcast with Roger Waters, Ken Loach and Yanis Varoufakis – this didn’t involve intoning about geopolitics, but reciting sonorously.

Most of what he was reciting sonorously was his 2016 album The Ship, an album that does exactly what it says on the tin. It’s every bit the score to a prestige Netflix drama about an empty and sinister vessel found drifting on the high seas (or in deep space), though at a pinch it could have soundtracked any isolated, malevolent place: cabins in woods, houses on hills, castles on mountains, you get the drift. Things build; then fall. Mood dominates over melody. There was a palpable sense of relief when the drone gave way to Eno’s gorgeous version of the Velvet Underground’s ‘I’m Set Free’.

Sitting through 75 minutes of variations not so much on a theme as on a note, I expected to be bored. But it was never dull: being in the presence of a full orchestra absolutely committed to never letting go, never allowing a moment of release, was physically overwhelming. My wife goes on about how cleansing gong baths are, and I imagine this was similar.

The Ship was followed by three earlier songs (again, given Eno is the father of ambient music, ‘song’ is used advisedly), some carefully tactful remarks about the Middle East, and the sense that Eno was rather enjoying a moment in the limelight, having been known throughout his career largely as music’s cleverest enabler.