Not more Shostakovich! Yes, but the South Bank weekend that was the latest of a plethora of centenary tributes to the composer focused rather on his artistic heirs. Dancers on a Tightrope took its title from a violin-and-piano piece by Sofia Gubaidulina, one of six such supposedly risk-taking younger figures whose music was explored in three programmes, while Shostakovich’s occupied only two. There were films and discussions, and two of the six — Valentin Silvestrov and Giya Kancheli — were present. But if the festival was stimulating it was somewhat gloomily so, begging more questions than it answered, and leaving me with doubts about most of the pieces performed.

Even if Shostakovich had lived in serene times, he would have posed an almighty problem for his successors. A talent of such dimension is apt to engulf a generation or two. Finnish composers, for example, have only just recovered from Sibelius. But when the anxiety of influence is mixed with the fear of death, when responses to a powerful creative personality are conditioned by what the government allows, and when that personality has been utterly contorted for the same reason, cultural confusion would seem inescap-able. If the South Bank events were a true indication, that is the present state of Russian music.

The very phrase, “Russian music” proves surprisingly tendentious. As emerged in a discussion chaired by Dennis Marks, “Russian music” in today’s Russia means only pop music, the new indigenous brand. And the word “Russia” has plenty of problems in post-Soviet times. Of the six composers, Silvestrov is Ukrainian, Kancheli Georgian, Arvo Pärt Estonian. If there is still “Russian music” in the old sense, what are the criteria of Russianness? As for the artistic benefits — as opposed to horrors — of the Soviet system, it appeared from the testimony of panel-members that the Russian state no longer supports “high” art in any special way.

Left to shift for themselves, “Russian” composers have also lost what the festival’s artistic advisor, Gerard McBurney, called the political “powder keg” on which they had sat for so long and which had concentrated their creative thoughts wonderfully.

Perhaps a better selection of their works might have been made for the weekend, but what we heard suggested a lack of persuasive individuality, even when the music wilfully exploited extremes of gesture and texture. Going beyond (or, at any rate, surviving) Shostakovich seems often to have been a matter of exaggerating an already exaggerated style.

Where Shostakovich is grotesquely ironic, Alfred Schnittke can be yet more bizarre. Where Shostakovich is grotesquely emphatic, Galina Ustvolskaya can be intolerably pummelling; and where Shostakovich is bleak and austere, Gubaidulina will make pieces wholly out of rawness and abstraction.

Her String Quartet No 2, played by the Arditti Quartet, like her Dancers on a Tightrope, given by Andrew Haveron and John Constable, is music of sheer sonorous insistency. On the immense scale of, say, her St John Passion, that approach becomes genuinely visionary, but the risk taken by too many of her works is that of sounding footling. Constable spent much time stroking the piano strings with a tumbler. And Schnittke can certainly be exasperating with his hugely elaborate jokiness. His String Trio, played by the violinist Gidon Kremer’s Kremerata Musica, takes an insouciant cadence and will not let it go.

Always the need to be more extremely extreme! The 87-year-old Ustvolskaya’s Compositions 1-3, played by the London Sinfonietta, directed from the piano by Reinbert de Leeuw, propose themselves as the last word in odd scoring, cluster harmony and aggressive percussion. No 2 (Dies Irae) is for piano, eight double-basses and a plywood cube that is beaten with mallets. It reflects her exacerbated religious temperament, but behind the sadomasochism I sensed a footling quality here, too.

Religion has been a recourse for several post-Shostakovich composers. Silvestrov has made a religion of the valetudinarianism heard in his violin sonata, Post-Scriptum (performed by Kremer and the pianist Katja Skanavi), with its apparent echoes of Mozart and Schumann. Throughout the weekend, one had the impression of Russian composers inhabiting what Marks spoke of as a fractured world. But where was the younger generation? Is there one? Has anyone in this cultural orbit found a way to write interesting music that is not fractured, religious or extremist? Is there a chance for music’s middle-ground?