Contemporary music is often described as disembodied or abstract, yet nothing could have been more intensely corporeal than cellist Neil Heyde's performance of Brian Ferneyhough's Time and Motion Study II. Even before the piece began, Heyde's body had become part of the performance, as three genuflecting attendants attached microphones and wires to intimate parts of his anatomy.

During the piece, which incorporates desperate vocal as well as instrumental sounds, Heyde and his cello were subjected to a vivid musical imprisonment by Paul Archbold's electronic manipulation. Fragments of his performance were played back to him as he grappled with subsequent sections, trying to escape a suffocating electronic mist of memory. His only solution was to give up in the face of this sonic entrapment, collapsing into silence after a final struggle.

This visceral performance was the climax of Durham University's three-day celebration of Ferneyhough's 60th birthday, and his three decades at the forefront of the musical avant-garde.

Earlier performances of solo works were no less revelatory. Pianist Nicolas Hodges played Opus Contra Naturam, an explosive three-movement work for speaking piano player. Ferneyhough imagines the pianist as a kind of existential joker, a cross between Liberace and an eccentric philosopher, and the piece forms part of his forthcoming opera on the death and afterlife of philosopher Walter Benjamin.

Hodges engaged in a dizzying conversation with the instrument and the music. As the piece careered through a dense fog of allusions to late-romantic harmony, he commanded the music to "stop" and "smack it" in a vain attempt to stem the intrusion of these alien references. Finally, he found only an ambivalent resolution in a fragmentary final movement.

Many of Ferneyhough's recent pieces incorporate references to pre-existing music. Unsichtbare Farben (Invisible Colours) for solo violin, performed by Mieko Kanno, is no exception. The piece is built around a fragment from a mass by 15th-century composer Ockeghem, and shards of the original appear through the cracks of Ferneyhough's complex compositional processes.

Kanno's performance was a vertiginous game of musical hide-and-seek, lyrical and volatile. Even more significant was her performance of Intermedio alla Ciaccona, another solo violin piece. Playing from memory, the directness of Kanno's performance demonstrated the unique richness of this music, and created a sense of poetic and expressive transcendence.