To hear the dedicated virtuosos of the London Sinfonietta getting to grips with some perversely opaque piece of avant-garde music is always inspiring. For playing four opaque piles of inconsequential twaddle in succession they should get medals – though presumably they chose the stuff in the first place. But that’s where my plaudits end. This was a simply dreadful advertisement for serious contemporary music. I would rather have all three of my remaining teeth extracted by a medieval blacksmith than be forced to sit through it again. And I hesitate to calculate the cost to the taxpayer of presenting this concert for the benefit of an audience that could have fitted into a village hall, had it not been boosted by 45 A-level pupils who had been invited to “play the critic” and write about the event. That borders on cruelty; perhaps the NSPCC should be alerted. Couldn’t the kids have been given just one proven masterpiece, to show them the power of contemporary music at its best?

For the record, the composers in the first half were Louis Andriessen (15 minutes of legato chords set against staccato chords), Francisco Lara (14 minutes of ear-splitting wailings for 11 instruments, using – and I quote the composer’s Delphic programme note – “a number of modes based on the sum of the harmonics of two fundamentals”), and Hans Abrahansen (a brain- numbing 19 minutes of minimalist canons, much of it comprising a man dusting a table and the strings playing pitchless overtones). All three pieces (conducted by Thierry Fischer) had the deadly aura of cerebral exercises written primarily to impress other initiates in the new-music ghetto. That’s not good enough in a public venue that gets a vast subsidy.

Then came the sole work by a British composer: the world premiere of Simon Holt’s Sueños (Dreams). This at least had the merit of a text to anchor us in some semblance of consciousness – though not much, since Holt chose seven poems by the impenetrable Spanish symbolist Antonio Machado. He then set them to music so murkily scored and hearse-paced that I feared Roderick Williams, the baritone soloist, might fall asleep while delivering them. Williams, incidentally, was kitted out like Aschenbach in Death in Venice and required to walk through curtains on which surreal, wishy-washy videos by Julia Bardsley were projected. A baffling end to a depressing night.

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