After a tentative start on Friday, it was left to Oliver Knussen and the London Sinfonietta to get Passion, the South Bank's Andriessen festival, really up and running on Sunday evening. An all-Andriessen programme provided the sharp focus missing two nights earlier, with three works drawn from different phases of his career, the last of them specially commissioned for the occasion.
The new work, La Passione, is described by the composer as a double concerto for vocalist and violin, composed with the singer Cristina Zavalloni and violinist Monica Germino in mind. Zavalloni, one of those unclassifiable crossover voices that Andriessen often prefers to classically trained singers, delivers a series of poems by the early 20th-century poet Dino Campana, while the violin comments and parades around her. The settings, full of bleakly terrifying imagery that is both surreal and apocalyptic, are woven into a continuous sequence. It is as if painful visions were being dragged to the surface of music, which moves between brassy ritornellos, spidery lyricism and instrument doublings that lend the texts a genderless detachment.
La Passione is separated by 37 years and several musical worlds from Ittrospezione II, which Andriessen wrote while he was studying with Luciano Berio in the 1960s. It's not just the vague title that places it in that avant-garde world; as a student, Andriessen called upon all the fashionable devices of that period, including indeterminacy. Yet despite its discontinuities and high degree of chromaticism, the music still anticipates his mature works: in the brassy edge to the scoring, in the amplification it demands, and in the way the music suddenly switches from total stasis to rapid forward movement.
Alongside the following piece, though, it seemed pretty tame stuff. De Snelheid, a 1983 study of speed in music, remains one of Andriessen's most imposing achievements, a piece that batters and drives its way through 18 minutes of high-energy invention propelled by the constant ticking of percussion. It's an essay in instrumental layering as well as tempo: the orchestra is divided into three groups, two of which, brass-dominated, steadily accelerate through most of the work, while the third, string-based, unfolds a long, looping melodic line. The tension rises remorselessly until a climax is reached, and all three groups join together in the same rhythm. If the process seems simple, the results are anything but, and it is a real challenge to get it right in a concert. Knussen's performance, typically, was just thrilling.
· Passion: The Music of Louis Andriessen runs until October 17. Details: 020-7960 4242.
