Three Pieces for Orchestra (1975) - > Frank Corcoran Symphony No.4 (1992) - > Lutoslawski Third Symphony in One Movement (1994) - > Frank Corcoran

In the first of six concerts focussing on classics of 12thcentury music - the Horizon series - Frank Corcoran chose as the centre piece a work by "a giant figure on his creative horizon", Witold Lutoslawski.

Listening to the works by the two composers in the NCH on Tuesday, it was clear that they shared a language, even if they did not speak the same dialect. Lutoslawski preserves the strongest links with the culture of the past; Corcoran has shed, not without violence, a load of such trappings. His Three Pieces, subtitled Pictures from My Exhibition, gloried in the freedom that belongs to the youthful spirit. Sent up like a kite, the music was at the mercy of the winds that snapped at the vanes and whistled stridently through them; but the cord held, thanks in no small measure to Richard Pittman's resourceful control and the wholehearted response of the NSO. Lutoslawski's Symphony No. 4, written in 1992, has not taken long to become "classic". Certainly it has a nobility and breadth that can accommodate extremes - the garish and the sombre, the pithy and the rhetorical - without discomfort; and it abounds in contrasting layers of sound and movement, lucidly presented by the players.

Corcoran's Third Symphony, only two years younger than Lutoslawski's No. 4, uses similar techniques, but in a more compressed form. The flavour of iconoclasm, so evident in the Three Pieces, lingers, but only adds a touch of acerbity to the large scale drama of the whole. Pittman and the NSO made it triumphantly expressive.