Birmingham University has a new home for its music department – the Bramall Music Building, situated at the heart of its Edgbaston campus. The centrepiece of the new complex is a pleasingly airy 450-seat concert hall, which was officially opened last month, and inaugurated with a festival that provided opportunities for a number of Birmingham-based ensembles to try out the space. One of those was Birmingham Contemporary Music Group (BCMG), whose concert managed to take in another celebration, too: the centenary of one of the most influential of all modernist works, Schoenberg's Pierrot Lunaire, which was first performed in Berlin in October 1912.

The new hall and its acoustics can apparently be configured in a number of different ways, but for this concert it was set up as a conventional recital hall, with a direct but quite dry sound. It certainly conveyed every particle of Claire Booth's compelling performance as Schoenberg's reciter, which charged the words with so much intensity and vivid imagery. Some performances emphasise the work's cabaret roots more than Booth did, but she fixed it as one of the greatest achievements of expressionism in music quite marvellously, and its effect was superbly enhanced by the five BCMG players, with Marie-Christine Zupancic's flute providing the voice with its perfect alter ego.

I'm not sure Messiaen's Quartet for the End of Time is the ideal partner for Schoenberg's melodrama, despite its similar status as a 20th-century classic; alongside the latter's compacted, hallucinatory world the quartet can seem a bit overextended and self-indulgent. But this performance was still totally involving, with violinist Laurence Jackson, clarinettist Timothy Lines and cellist Ulrich Heinen taking their solo movements with exactly the right kind of devotional concentration the music demands, and pianist Malcolm Wilson providing the rhythmic drive in the ensemble movements.