A large dollop of orchestral music from Birtwistle is always a pleasure, though it will no doubt take some time to get to grips with every facet of this bloody-minded music.

With Carmen Arcadiae, masculine rhythms elbow their way to the front of the queue while irritated strings prance and object in the distance. Birtwistle slyly provides contrasting instrumentation for the same erratic rhythmical patterns, like trying different outfits on the same body, but they all look good! After a while the two opposing elements meet up as the separate sections speed up and shrink. After the collision they slow down and skip in tandem, not exactly merrily, but with definite malevolent glee.

If you've ever met a softly spoken psychopath, you can imagine what affect Silbury Air can have. It disrupts by stealth, wending its wormy way until you're caught off guard and knocked sideways. A slow, romantically-tinged opening breaks into extreme slabs of muted aggression that seem to exhaust themselves before picking up momentum again and whipping up another pungent brew. If you like or love Birtwistle's musical language you won't be shocked or disturbed by this sort of violence, only exhilarated.

Secret Theatre tiptoes on with repeated pizzicato mechanisms only to lurch and spread into spasmodic streams of orchestral eruptions. The music then drifts, tenderly glides and divides into distinct, opposing branches. To describe every tangent and surprise in this piece would take an age, but it's enough to know there are thrills aplenty. The title suggests a narrative character to this music, but could easily be describing some kind of sinister creature with a large slow body and dim, vicious intentions.

Not all of Birtwistle's music works perfectly outside the concert hall. This sort of intensity isn't always ideal for domestic listening but, with such visceral playing and pristine sound quality, no contemporary music fan should dare to miss out.

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