Wolf-Lieder, Brett Dean's striking new song cycle, was commissioned by Birmingham Contemporary Music Group as part of its Sound Investment scheme. It is a portrait of the 19th-century Austrian composer, Hugo Wolf, who ended his days in a Viennese asylum, convinced he had ousted his former friend Gustav Mahler from the state opera and had taken over the running himself.

Using touchingly delicate expansions of two songs from Wolf's Spanish Songbook as a frame, Dean creates a vivid portrait of crumbling sanity, setting fragments of the composer's letters and medical reports, as well as Charles Bukowski's poem, When Hugo Wolf Went Mad. The highly charged soprano lines are surrounded by instrumental textures that are always in flux, whether whirling past in high speed, interlocking skeins, or melting into amorphous masses of pitches and pulses. The voice (Valdine Anderson's, superbly in control) was occasionally obscured by the instruments, but the meshing of the two elements was so precise, and the psychological state they suggested so vivid, it mattered less and less.

If BCMG and conductor Sakari Oramo were on more straightforward ground with the UK premiere of Mark-Anthony Turnage's No Let Up - an eight-minute romp that does exactly what it says on the label), Rolf Wallin's The Age of Wire and String presented them with a different kind of challenge again. Inspired by a novel by Ben Marcus, Wallin's music is put together with a jeweller's precision, with instrumental colour and effects mattering more than precise pitches and rhythms.

In Dean's work, such instrumental techniques are a means to a more complex dramatic end; in Wallin's they seem to be the end itself.