THE COMPOSER Richard Barrett gives you everything: grand rhetoric, epic themes, high drama, revolutionary fervour. Unfortunately, that’s just his programme-note. When it came to the premiere of his pithily named NO (resistance & vision, Part 1), one struggled in vain to match the sounds to the pre-match build-up.

According to the latter, this was a cri de coeur against not only the Iraq war but the tactics of “intimidation, coercion or instilling fear” applied “for decades” by the “US government and its allies” to the non-Western world. That accounts for the NO in the title. The resistance part, Barrett tells us, is his stand against the “insidious penetration” into culture of “corporate values and, therefore, dumbing-down”. And the vision? That is his notion of how music might lead the way to a better world.

Clear so far? So was I. Even marginally in sympathy with some of Barrett’s aims — unreconstructed hippy idealist that I am. But then his 25-minute orchestral epic started (delivered with painstaking professionalism by the BBC Symphony Orchestra under Tadaaki Otaka), and I was floundering.

It’s not that Barrett is a disorganised composer. Far from it. Though his musical ideas will never win him top billing on Your Hundred Best Tunes, he marshals them with clarity and coherence. Sections perceptibly grow out of each other; there are obvious backgrounds and foregrounds; plus vivid solos (a tremendous rant for trombone) and unusual orchestral textures — none more ominous than the inexorably rising violin spiccatos towards the end of the piece.

No, the problem was that I couldn’t see any connection whatsoever between the radical political and social agenda that Barrett postulates for his music, and the music itself. What he has written is just another noisy, hyper-complex avant-garde score that will be heard by a tiny minority of a tiny minority. The rest is delusion and hype. I am surprised that nobody at the BBC pointed that out before they paid for the piece and printed Barrett’s preposterous preamble.

Still, what followed was worth anyone’s ticket money (or licence fee): a scintillating performance of Prokofiev’s Third Piano Concerto — mercurial and witty one moment; ardent and lyrical the next; mesmerising everywhere — by the young Macedonian pianist Simon Trpceski. And he then played a magical encore: the Prelude and Pajdushka, partly a toccata and partly a jangling folk-dance, by his older compatriot and teacher, Zivoin Glishic. Music to which the ears and heart said “yes” rather than NO.