Gerald Barry is one of that increasingly rare breed of contemporary composers whose music is instantly identifiable. The opening of his Wiener Blut, a ricocheting line bursting with energy, swathed in tremolos and coloured by unpredictable instrumental doublings, couldn't have been written by anyone else.
The title conjures up memories of Johann Strauss's operettas and waltzes, and Barry has called the work a "harmonic Baedeker for Viennese travellers". But apart from a rhythm borrowed from Die Fledermaus, this 12-minute ensemble piece does not offer a tour through the delights of musical Vienna so much as a cryptic journey through a range of autobiographical references.
Buried in the textures of Wiener Blut are the distilled essences of harmonic figures that Barry has accumulated through his life (his "poignancy grid", he calls it). Few of these are obvious. A snatch of Messiaen flashes by, and there's an unmistakable Stravinskian cadence, but the other memories are woven seamlessly into a virtuoso piece of writing that twists and turns, accumulates tremendous momentum then brakes suddenly and veers off in another direction altogether, or projects itself as swaggering and aggressive only to melt into moments of gentle, jewelled lyricism.
Barry commands this hand-me-down language wonderfully; this music is disconcerting in its originality yet never arcane or iconoclastic, and its physical impact is immense. Like a lot of Barry's music it is also fearsomely difficult to play, but there was never a hint of insecurity in this ebullient London premiere. Wiener Blut was commissioned for this year's Aldeburgh Festival, and it was brought to the late-night Prom by Thomas Adès and the Birmingham Contemporary Music Group.
The rest of the Birmingham programme was given over to Busoni and his two most famous pupils. The teacher himself was represented by his Berceuse Elégiaque, in the reduction by Erwin Stein that rather plays down the work's comforting lushness, while Varèse's Ecuatorial, a raw, unpredictable and extraordinary piece, sat uneasily alongside Kurt Weill's Berliner Requiem.
The Weill, the first of the works in this year's Proms to mark the composer's centenary, had Garry Magee and HK Gruber as soloists. Magee becomes a more and more impressive baritone with every appearance, and was commanding in his small role here. Gruber's crooning, however, is a taste that needs to be acquired. And I haven't got there yet.
