The BBC has long been a staunch supporter of Poul Ruders, both while he was living in this country and since he returned to his native Denmark. This week Radio 3 joined forces with Oxford Contemporary Music to celebrate Ruder's 50th birthday with a concert that will be broadcast in the network's new-music strand, Here and Now, in January. As the composer himself observed, no one back home in Denmark has thought of paying him such a tribute, though his opera The Handmaid's Tale, based on Margaret Atwood's novel, will be premiered in Copenhagen next spring.

There were new works in this programme too - the first performance of Three Tiny Pieces for Great Friends, for violin and piano, and the British premiere of the substantial Horn Trio, heard in New York earlier this month. The rest of the recital ranged right across Ruders's career, from his first acknowledged work, Three Letters from an Unknown Soldier, an anti-Vietnam war protest piece composed when he was just 18, which Ruders played himself, through the turbulent, dark rhythmic jostlings of Vox in Rama (1983), for clarinet (Duncan Prescott), violin (Rebecca Hirsch) and piano (Rolf Hind), to the remarkably restrained and ghostly Throne of 1988, in which a solo clarinet wanders through a series of musical landscapes, shadowed every step of the way by the piano, which plays only single notes until the very last chord of the piece.

But the violent energy that is sometimes explicit, sometimes stiflingly suppressed in Ruders's earlier music seems to have been replaced now by a much more open and frankly expressive world. The Bergian lyricism introduced in the Three Tiny Pieces (eloquently shaped by Hirsch and Hind) is explored much further in the Horn Trio, which Ruders wrote for the superb American soloist William Purvis, who played it in Oxford too. There are four movements, the first and last, concerned with discursive thematic matters, dwarfing the more highly coloured central pair - a pulsing, glinting scherzo and a lonely slow movement, full of portamento and quarter tones, almost exclusively given to the horn, which Ruders describes as the turning point of the work. The shadows of the two great horn trios in the repertoire, by Brahms and Ligeti, inevitably hover over this new work, but Ruders's architecture across the half-hour span is thoroughly satisfying, many of the ideas arresting and intriguing.

***** Unmissable **** Recommended *** Enjoyable ** Mediocre * Terrible