What an extraordinary fellow Michael Nyman is. Music of a sort — jogging marathons for rhythmic twitches and melodic riffs — seems to pour from his facile pen. Music for operas, for films, concert platforms, a computer game, though one wonders with this uneven heap how much is music for posterity.

Yet the animating thoughts aren’t necessarily trivial. He’s set vocal texts by the Holocaust-haunted Paul Celan; in Facing Goya he grappled with eugenics. And on Thursday no garlands of poesy adorned A Handshake in the Dark. Commissioned by the BBC for its Symphony Orchestra and Chorus, this new work draws on the Iraqi Jamal Jumá’s poem sequence Letters to My Brother, written during the first Gulf War. “What sort of torture are they preparing for you now?/ Putting you in a sack full of cats, and beating you/ Making you walk barefoot on broken glass?” — these are words you want to hear.

Thanks to Nyman’s perverse genius, however, we heard almost none of them. Accessing Jumá’s complete text only after finishing the first draft, he squeezed in extra stanzas by superimposing them on many of those already set. This forced the heroic Symphony Chorus to divide into eight parts and plough into inaudibility. Yet even when Nyman stuck to one poem, he made penetration difficult. Block textures abruptly changed but rarely thinned. The dynamic range stayed severely restricted. Sharp sounds were avoided. This wasn’t death by bullets in the sand; this was suffocation in a glue factory.

For the chorus, the orchestra and John Storgards, one can only offer commiserations. And at least clarity emerged elsewhere. The Finnish conductor might not be the world’s most thrilling, but he maintained a firm grip on the fight for glory in Sibelius’s Fifth Symphony, and released the sad beauties of Butterworth’s A Shropshire Lad.

Cruel, though, in this eccentric programme for the soaring choir to deliver Schoenberg’s ecstatic Friede auf Erden in the composer’s version with an orchestral safety net. We’d had enough doublings and camouflage with Nyman; couldn’t a jewel simply be a jewel?

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