Helmut Lachenmann is still not valued in Britain as much he is across the rest of Europe, but Transcendent, the Royal College of Music's week-long festival devoted to his music, will do much to put this right. The festival ended with a concert by the London Sinfonietta at the Queen Elizabeth Hall, in which Martyn Brabbins conducted Lachenmann's most widely performed ensemble pieces, alongside the London premiere of his latest large-scale work.

The classic was Mouvement (vor der Erstarrung), from 1984, the work in which Lachenmann summed up all that he achieved in his first two decades as a composer and set the agenda for what he would accomplish in the years to come. It still sounds wonderfully fresh; not alienating as much as challenging via the unconventional demands it puts on instrumentalists, while remaining lucid and structurally rigorous.

There's nothing hit or miss about Lachenmann's music; everything is precisely imagined. In Concertini, that precision is as striking as ever. With groups of instrumentalists arrayed around the auditorium as well as onstage, the 45-minute piece envelops the audience in its sounds, isolating different instruments or kinds of sound production in turn to create the mini-concertos.

Lachenmann has certainly not blunted his radical edge, but perhaps his music has become more listener-friendly.

· To be broadcast on Radio 3 on January 6.