There's not a huge amount of Luigi Nono's music in the Southbank Centre's festival that carries his name, and what there is comes mostly from the beginning and end of his composing career. The two decades from the mid-1950s onwards, in which his music was fired by his political radicalism, and which includes some of his most striking achievements, get cursory treatment.

Yet the last concert in the series (the festival resumes briefly next spring) did contain one of those passionately committed pieces. First performed in 1966, A Floresta e Jovem e Cheja de Vido is hard to classify. Its strident protests against American imperialism - the score is dedicated to the Vietnamese Liberation Front - could make it seem like a typical piece of 1960s agit-prop. But there's more to it than that. With its collages of texts (some embedded in the pre-recorded sounds, others delivered by a soaring soprano and three actors) punctuated by a solo clarinet and five percussionists committing GBH on a set of metal plates, there's a clear theatrical element to the piece. But part of that dramatic power depends on understanding the didactic texts, and having carefully printed and translated them in the programme, the SBC turned off the lights in the auditorium so no one could follow them.

But the performance conducted by Beat Furrer had the kind of blazing belief Nono's music always needs. Barbara Hannigan, the faultless soprano in A Floresta, had prefaced it with one of the unaccompanied songs from Nono's 1962 Canti di Vita e d'Amore, perfectly poised and authentically Italianate in its lyricism. Before that, Maurizio Pollini had played the haunting piano-and-tape Sofferte Onde Serene from 1977, which is dedicated to him, with the same consummate musicianship with which he also delivered Schoenberg's Op 11 and Op 19 piano pieces.