It is rare to hear a contemporary orchestral piece with the blistering power and emotional intensity of Luca Francesconi's Wanderer. Here, the work was cast as a huge, 25-minute single movement, and conductor Zsolt Nagy led the BBC Symphony Orchestra on a musical journey that spanned a vast range of orchestral colour and expressive drama.

Now in his late 40s, Francesconi belongs to the post-Berio generation of Italian composers. Wanderer reveals his debt to his older compatriot with its fastidious orchestration and its relentless harmonic momentum. However, the piece creates a directness of expression that is vividly new.

At the Maida Vale Studios, it began by opening up the extremes of the orchestral register. A piercing skirl of high woodwind writing was suspended above a slow-moving double-bass melody. Slowly, this sinewy tune overwhelmed the orchestra in a climax of shattering force, led by the dark fanfares of two trumpet players positioned at the front of the stage. After a chorale-like passage for brass, the music entered a region of emotional desolation, as flurries of woodwind energy echoed over a slow threnody of impassioned melody for the string players. Supported by a bedrock of lugubrious repeated notes, the music grew again into another towering explosion before the chilling emptiness of the coda. Wanderer transfigured the gestures of an earlier modernism to create a vivid immediacy, a contemporary tone-poem that was an heir to the flamboyant orchestral works of the late 19th century.

Francesconi's piece was part of a programme of new Italian music. Ivan Fedele's Epos was an essay in orchestral density, but more striking was the quirky imagination of Franco Romitelli's Audiodrome. Beginning with a quote from Strauss's Alpine Symphony, the piece wrapped this familiar music in a thick cloak of orchestral texture, ending with the weird distortion of an electric guitar and two loudhailers. At the other extreme of musical possibility was Mieko Kanno's mesmerising performance of four of Salvatore Sciarrino's six Caprices for solo violin - a fantastical exploration of quietness and strangeness.