BBC SO/Knussen, Barbican London<br></br>BBC SO/Slatkin, Symphony Hall, Birmingham

One of the benefits of Oliver Knussen's intensely compact and concise style is that it enables a comprehensive survey of his development as a composer to be showcased in one concert. As a celebration of his 50th birthday, the Barbican's Composer Portrait included three symphonies, works for soprano and chamber forces featuring Lucy Shelton, as well as solo piano pieces.

The Symphony in One Movement, which received its first public performance, is a recently revised version of the Concerto for Orchestra, originally composed in 1969. That same year, Peter Maxwell Davies wrote his St Thomas Wake and both pieces feature an uneasy juxtaposition of jazz and Expressionistic styles. Knussen's bold and occasionally brash early work afforded both an anticipation of the mature composer's language and, in its syncopated piano line and overheated percussion outbursts, also provided a fascinating glimpse of paths he chose not to take. The Symphony no 3 (1979) received a fluent reading, the BBC players successfully encompassing its gripping fusion of elemental power and poetic fantasy.

Under Leonard Slatkin, the orchestra also celebrated the 50th birthday year of another British composer – Dominic Muldowney. His Piano Concerto no 2 received its world premiere in a concert marking the 80th birthday of the BBC. After the "Toccata festiva" for organ and orchestra by Samuel Barber, overblown, trite and bombastic by turns, it was a relief to concentrate on Muldowney's new work – Mozartian in scale, proportion and taste. The concerto's poise and restraint reflected the cool elegance of soloist Angela Hewitt's playing. Her credentials as an exponent of Bach and the 20th-century French Masters inspired the potent mix of classicism and rhythmic exactitude of the dance-like outer movements and the highly perfumed exoticism of the voluptuous slow movement.

The score is dedicated to Harold Pinter and some of that writer's epigrammatic wit informs much of the concerto's lean and taught expression. The opening movement traversed diverse terrain from its playful beginning, which sounded like an ending, through an occasionally dark-hued tango-like development section to its enigmatic, inconclusive finish. A lyrical central section, framed by a lamenting theme for oboes, alternated serene Messiaen-like piano chords with sequences of liquid fluency. The ostinato-driven Rondo Finale satisfyingly fused elements from both previous movements. A mini-cadenza of honed brilliance led into a Poulencian final flourish.

Hewitt responded to this chaste but coltish work, fashioned expressly to her talents, with playing of considerable subtlety and refinement. It would be a just reward for Muldowney if his new concerto were to join the very core of her repertoire.