If a preservation society were formed to save Gerald Barry from demolition I'd certainly join it. Among the regular composers in new music concerts, this Irishman in his mid-fifties is the joker in the pack, always chafing, subverting, springing surprises.

This Birmingham Contemporary Music Group concert with Thomas Adès conducting gave us two samples of his mischief. The first, and better, was the hare-brained Lisbon of 2006: nine brightly coloured minutes of unison lines, darting thoughts and chugging repetitions, each texture chasing each other as a kitten might its tail. Adès and the ensemble tossed it off with a flick of the wrist. It's true: contemporary music can be fun.

But it wasn't Lisbon that led a buzzing audience to queue, not for ice-cream, but for complimentary scores. That was Barry's Beethoven, the latest in BCMG's noble line of Sound Investment Commissions, funded in part by more than 50 individual investors.

The 19-minute piece is as pious a memorial as Adès's little vocal squib Brahms is - that's to say, not pious at all. Barry has taken Beethoven's “Immortal Beloved” letters - those epics of the tattered, frustrated lover - and set every word in English translation for a hard-pressed bass voice and an ensemble fattened with deep-chested winds such as the bass clarinet and double bassoon.

The resulting sound was comically galumphing. Imagine neo-classic Stravinsky drowning in mud. Could Barry be suggesting Beethoven's damaged hearing, with all high frequencies lost?

Stephen Richardson, the valiant soloist, suffered his own trials, sometimes scraping the bottom of his range, at other times flung into falsetto, the words rattled out at a quaver pace that left little room for feeling (and often audibility). Grotesqueness continued when the pace slowed: Barry made certain of that by backing lovelorn Ludwig's final thoughts with a snail-paced stroll through the harmonies of O Come All Ye Faithful.

Unlike the Spanish-tinged phantasmagoria of Adès's Living Toys - this clever and genial concert's finale - Beethoven didn't seem like music that might last. Nor, earlier, did Poul Ruders's Absym. But I still love Barry's jokes and ironies.

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