BBC SO/Storgards, Barbican, London

Michael Nyman's latest premiere took the unlikely form of a choral blockbuster. A Handshake in the Dark sets verses by the Iraqi poet Jamal Jumá addressed to his brother, then a soldier in US captivity during the first Gulf War. They are intimate and harrowing, imagining what the prisoner might have been going through; and they have provoked an angry musical work, which sounds like an attempt to articulate the anguish that the war and its successors has caused.

The sheer loudness and density of this performance, sung with mighty stamina by the BBC Symphony Chorus, was bewildering. The project's several versions recall the gestation of Sibelius's Fifth Symphony, which ended the concert. Nyman rejected an early plan to set war poetry by David Bomberg, though he kept some of the music. Later, when Nyman thought that the new work was nearly finished, the writer sent him more poems, and he decided to superimpose one layer of texts on another.

On paper, the music looks lean and lucid; but to the ear, only some of it sounded that way. The rhythms of the lines collided with one another and with the orchestra's, and all but a handful of the words became inaudible. Long stretches came out at an unremitting fortissimo that redoubled the music's impenetrable tendencies. Yet in the score, the dynamics are strikingly more restrained, so that the orchestra and chorus complement each other and real climaxes stand out. Did the piece not work like that? The change creates a sense of unbearable urgency, but it was a mistake. Buried in there are some of Nyman's strongest ideas, and most of the time you simply couldn't hear them.

John Storgards, conducting, delivered on pace and intensity, and got the chorus to surpass itself further in Schoenberg's heady Friede auf Erden. He induced the orchestra to give a lively and warm performance of the Sibelius symphony. Storgard presented the music as a series of ever more surprising but essentially logical developments, with an exact judgement of accelerations. Only at the very end of the work did he let tautness diminish the momentous character.