This year's BBC's composer weekend, focusing on the music of Judith Weir, was entitled Telling the Tale - an apt summary of a composer whose work constitutes a joyous celebration of the limitless potential of narrative, and demands that we acknowledge universal resonances within the multiplicity of myths, sagas and folklore that form the basis of both western and eastern culture. Weir's best work is at once timeless, accessible and profound, and one is repeatedly struck by the quiet unity of purpose that underscores the tremendous stylistic range of her output.

Ideologically drawn to Taoism, she sees ethical and spiritual parables in the workings of nature. Winter Song, given its London premiere by the BBC Symphony under Anton de Ridder, hints at humanity's existential isolation as pizzicato cellos and basses doggedly pick their way through a miasma of high strings that drifts like snow.

Weir's understanding of spirituality also brings with it a fierce awareness of the catastrophes sometimes perpetuated in its name. A late-night concert given by the BBC Singers in St Giles's Cripplegate juxtaposed All the End of the Earth with the Missa del Cid. The former looks heavenward by ringing ecstatic changes on a cantus firmus by the medieval French composer Pérotin. The latter interweaves fragments of the Mass with a searchingly ironic depiction of religious war in Moorish Spain.

Weir drew on three Scottish folk tales, meanwhile, for her opera The Vanishing Bridegroom, a sustained exercise in the uncanny that investigates the impact of supernatural events on succeeding generations of the same family. The performance was hampered by variable diction on the part of the cast, though there was some beautiful singing from Ailish Tynan and Owen Gilhooly, while Martyn Brabbins' conducting superbly illuminated the work's sensuous, yet strangely threatening, sound world.