Â鶹Éç

Tonight’s pocket history of post-war music, reflecting Radio 3’s Fifty Modern Classics, opens with Ligeti’s playful ±Ê´Çè³¾±ð for 100 ticking metronomes. In Berio’s solo trombone extravaganza the player employs many extended techniques and at one point turns to the audience to ask, ‘Why?’ Xenakis makes lively play out of rigorous patternings and Cage – whose centenary we mark this year – removes the idea of a sound source altogether.

Before that notorious provocation there’s Jonathan Harvey’s haunting electronic amalgam of a Winchester Cathedral bell and the voice of his boy chorister son, and Louis Andriessen’s thrilling, hard-Minimalist musical clock.

There will be no interval