BBC Symphony Orchestra/Zoltán Peskó, Barbican Hall, London

The message may be short, but the sound is infinite

Since words pay the bills, you'll rarely find a critic who admits to being lost for them. After the BBC Symphony Orchestra's performances of György Kurtág's orchestral cycles Messages and New Messages under Zoltán Peskó I was speechless. Bug-eyed with the kind of rapt, dumbstruck awe you might expect to feel when seeing a Rodin for the first time. Grasping for metaphor, dizzy with the sense of a perfect first encounter the likes of which I've only had with Bach, Biber or Couperin, my only thought was: why isn't this music better known?

I remember feeling the same way when I heard Kurtág's song-cycle Messages of the Late R. V. Troussova for the first time early last year. But song-settings are easy to describe. With "abstract" instrumental music, you're reduced to desperate movie-pitch similies – It's Panic meets Gymnopédies meets Der Grosse Fuge! – or dry theoretical terms. Having ruled out lines such as "microtonal and aphoristic" (too thin, too restrictive), or "evocative" (isn't most music?), the simplest pitch for Kurtág's Opus 34 and Opus 34c Messages that I can muster is this: Webern with love. (Which would make Troussova Berg with love.) Not the schmaltzy ideal of the Hallmark versifiers, but the sort of acute tenderness that sees clearly the persons to whom it is directed and recognises them for what they are. Kurtág's Messages are exactly that; recognitions communications, notes to friends, to fellow musicians, to his listeners.

Though the average length of a single message is barely 90 seconds and each cycle lasts little more than 10 minutes, the edifice of sound from which the letters are drawn and coloured seems infinite in scale. The forces involved are symphonic, the effect like that of chamber music. Through wisps of dissonance and overtones and penumbra of suggested echoes, time, metre and light seem to shift. This is subtle, generous, passionate, human music; as immediate and intimate as a Picasso sketch.

Drawing distinctions between the two cycles, both of which were composed across one decade, is perhaps less helpful than might normally be the case. The candour and lyrical simplicity of Inscription on a Grave in Cornwall (the only word-setting in either cycle and beautifully sung by the BBC Singers) suggests that the focus of Opus 34 is mortality, the astringent strings and suspenseful bass of Les Adieux, and the cool, intense glow of horns and clarinets in Merran's Dream point to imagination and intellect as the central preoccupations of Opus 34c. But neither cycle stays still; flickers of humour, odd yelps of anger, smooth soothings lilt and twist within the textures. If these are aphorisms, they are thick with potential meanings and moods.

Perhaps because of a restive atmosphere in the orchestra, the most roundly moving performance was that of Ildikó Vékony, who played Kurtág's Splinters – a lonely, aching, four-movement work, revised in 1973 for solo cimbalom – with astonishing ferocity and tenderness; pulling the sweetest coppery syllables from her watery, mysterious, dank-toned instrument. Not for the first time, I found myself appalled that when there is music of such genuine rapture and wonder, we are bombarded with spiritual simulacra of the Tavener/Pärt school. (Is Kurtág on the Classic FM playlist? He should be.) Not for the first time, I wish I'd left at the interval in order to stay a little longer in that rare, still space.

Kurtág is hot property within the new music cliques; a veritable kiss of death to wider popularity, or so it seems. Yet nothing I heard in this concert could be described as "difficult" unless you actively dislike having your breath taken away. Of Bartok's Dance Suite and The Miraculous Mandarin – the commercial carrots to the Kurtág – I've little to say. Both pieces stayed reasonably well together despite uneven attentiveness to Peskó, both displayed excellent work from the BBCSO's principal oboe and clarinet players, and both suffered the effect of having their composer's deliberate vulgarity – a vulgarity specific to the material – seem accidental by comparison. But the casual brutality of Bartok's lurid ballet and the tender suggestiveness of Kurtág's music have little in common beyond their country of origin.

a.picard@independent.co.uk