The BBC National Orchestra of Wales, despite its acronym, reflects a repertoire generally more then than now. This concert of contemporary music was a bold attempt to redress that balance.

These Premises are Alarmed by Thomas Adès was an exuberant opener. Its allusions to a break-in and setting off of sirens and alarms are specfic yet, with its irridescent orchestration, the piece manages to be a sensory rather than blatantly sensational experience. Lutoslawski's Les éspaces du sommeil, written in 1974, was the only work not of the 1990s. Although sometimes lacking depth low in his range, baritone Jeremy Huw Williams captured much of the elusive quality of Robert Desnos's words.

The questionable inclusion here was à la Duduki by Georgian composer Giya Kancheli. Primarily contemplative but with striking brass outbursts, it was not unworthy, simply too long - sapping some of the emotional stamina required for the final and most important work, the song cycle Ad Ora Incerta.

In his setting of four poems by Primo Levi meditating on the Holocaust, Simon Bainbridge creates a soundscape painfully evocative of bleakness and desolation. His symbiotic partnering of mezzo soprano with a bassoon soloist was mesmerising: Susan Bickley delivered the words with the detachment that is Bainbridge's equivalent of Levi's distilled objectivity, the only means for him to fulfil his intensely felt obligation as a survivor to bear witness to the almost unutterable truth of the death camps. Against this, bassoonist Dorian Cooke's threnody gave voice to the anguish of heart and spirit. Throughout the evening, Jac van Steen's authoritative conducting was an inspiration to the BBC NOW, but his realisation of the symphonic scale of Bainbridge's conception was masterly. A harrowing but profoundly affecting performance.