Birmingham Contemporary Music Group, CBSO Centre, Birmingham

Finally Oliver Knussen, who has himself always done difficult things without palaver, brought the players on for Birtwistle’s Silbury Air while the technos were still faffing. Enough, his emphatic frame seemed to insist, was enough.

Left to its own devices, the BCMG purveys well-planned, smoothly executed concerts, and this one was no exception. It was a neat idea to programme Morton Feldman and his teacher Stefan Wolpe together, but to separate their works, which have almost nothing in common apart from an Expressionism so broadly defined as to be practically meaningless. Feldman's The Viola in My Life is characteristic of the disembodied, rarefied manner he somehow derived from the paintings of Rothko and Philip Guston, if more audibly thematic than most of his work; Wolpe’s Piece in Two Parts for Six Players is so densely composed that its themes are hard to catch, despite some hyper-refined instrumentation. How did these two Jewish composers from opposite corners of modern life and aesthetics get on on Eighth Street, New York? Shared agony perhaps: Wolpe channelling his into serial complexity, Feldman repressing his into pregnant silence.

But this disagreement is no more striking than the phenomenon of Jo Kondo, Tokyo-born and trained, but North America-based since 1977 (he’s now 63), and the inventor of a method as individual in its way as Reich’s process music or Ligeti’s micro-polyphony. “Linear music”, as Kondo calls it, sounds American but in fact started in Japan.

The early Standing, which opened last night’s concert, seems to illustrate it well. It begins with a single melody, quick and convulsively rhythmic, but shared out between three instruments (here violin, piano and marimba, though there is some choice), who adopt what Western musicians know as hocketing, where the melody is thrown from instrument to instrument in a tricky, pass-the-parcel fashion. After a time the tune spreads into (discreet) polyphonies. Oddly enough, it’s a technique that Birtwistle has also used, in his rougher way: in Silbury Air threads of melody accumulate all sorts of harmonic detritus, like mud on a tractor wheel.

Kondo, though, is less rustic. The latest refinement of his style comes out beautifully in the new BCMG commission, a brief setting of three Tennyson poems (Three Songs Tennyson Sung – exactly so-called) for soprano and seven instruments. The convulsive style has grown gentler, but it has the same obsessive quality. The voice floats exquisite melodies across broken rhythms echoed all the time by fragments of instrumental figuration; the harmonies linger hauntingly round a limited number of notes and chords. On paper it looks like a 15th-century motet by Ockeghem; but the sound is modern-lyrical, reflective not graphic: the splendour doesn’t fall on Kondo’s castle walls and the horns of elfland blow always, not just when summoned.

Claire Booth sang these lovely songs with great eloquence, and she was also in superb form in Knussen’s own moving Requiem – Songs for Sue, composed for her but in memory of his ex-wife, who died suddenly, still young and still much-loved, a few years ago. The songs flow seamlessly through polyglot texts by Dickinson, Machado, Auden and Rilke, supported by a miniature orchestra whose finely conceived colourings remind one all the time how annoying it is that Knussen completes so few works, in a career devoted too selflessly to other people’s music.

It was apt that he was there on the platform while Rosemary Johnson presented a highly deserved Royal Philharmonic Society award to Jackie and Stephen Newbould for their work on BCMG. But the attractive little instrumental piece he then conducted in celebration (title not revealed) was by John Woolrich: very nice, but somehow typical.