Silence? Not much of that, though considering that this big vocal tapestry from the Polish film composer Zbigniew Preisner came swathed in mikes, we should be grateful the sound levels stayed humane. As for night, it spread across the Barbican stage, shrouded in varied degrees of dark, with the Portuguese singer Teresa Salgueiro, the Crouch End Festival Chorus, remnants of the London Symphony Orchestra, and a mixed bag of instrumentalists haloed in shifting spotlights.

And dreams? Not in my head, I’m afraid. The procession of slow mournful segments, mostly inaudible Latin texts from the Latin Bible, and the pompous presentation of emaciated material made this an experience as drained of bliss as Preisner’s other lunge into long-form creativity, Requiem for My Friend. Others around clearly felt differently.

To appreciate Preisner it helps to be Polish. Those plangent folk phrases embedded inside almost everything he writes are one of his music’s best features. They played a key part in shaping that Central European melancholy and fear trembling through Krzysztof Kieslowski’s films, such as the Three Colours trilogy.

But once Preisner jumps from a mosaic of short cues to a connected piece, his technical handicaps are revealed. He’s a master of the telling phrase and cadence, and that’s it. No development. No spine. Silence, Nights & Dreams, nearly an hour long, is a jellyfish minus the sting.

Amplification didn’t help; nor did Salgueiro, muffled and sometimes loose in pitch. Help finally arrived in the second half with the powerfully eloquent Elzbieta Towarnicka, the soprano from many Preisner soundtracks, featured in a film and television selection, with an added morsel from his Kieslowski memorial Requiem for my Friend. Cut loose from the rest of that epic, the Lacrimosa revealed Preisner close to his miniature best, bewailing human loss and the world’s ills in music echoing the Polish past but still, somehow, adrift in time.

Preisner himself soberly conducted the first half; Kriss Russman, absurdly emphatic, took over for the remainder.

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