John Woolrich's Oboe Concerto ends with a shattering musical contrast. In his Aldeburgh festival performance, oboist Nicholas Daniel's fragile, lyrical line was cut off by a brutal crash from the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra, conducted by Sakari Oramo. It was as a shocking moment, but it was the logical conclusion to a gripping musical process.

At the start of piece, the dividing lines between soloist and orchestra were deliberately blurred. Woolrich enveloped his soloist with a choir of three oboes and soprano saxophone, which commented on and supported the soloist's music. But as the piece progressed, the orchestra and solo oboist became more and more opposed, as Daniel created a vivid lament from his music while Oramo led the orchestra in a series of forceful, mechanistic dances.

There was a structural starkness in the way the piece moved, as these blocks of music were juxtaposed with one another. However, Daniel's performance was strikingly immediate, and each of his long solos was more intense than the last. In one passage, his keening melody was suspended above a frozen landscape of string sonority, as if inhabiting a different musical realm from the orchestra. The orchestral players leapt in with another furious dance, trying to erase the memory of the solo oboe line, and the music was propelled along to the dark, ritualistic violence of its final bars.

Part of a brilliantly conceived programme, the concerto was played next to one of the classics of instrumental theatre, Birtwistle's Ritual Fragment, in a playful performance by the Birmingham Contemporary Music Group. The rest of the concert released connections between the pastoral idyll of Vaughan Williams's Tallis Fantasia, and the miraculous imagination of Janacek's Taras Bulba.

This piece, with its uniquely unpredictable orchestration, as a quiescent organ line peeks out behind a brass chorale, and a flamboyant polka is overlaid with tubular bells, is one of the most extreme essays in discontinuity in the repertoire. But the cumulative effect of the piece, as these tiny fragments were forced together in a huge, three-movement structure, was profoundly uplifting in Oramo's performance with the CBSO.