London Sinfonietta /Queen Elizabeth Hall London, review Composers of "contemporary classical music" used to be a fastidiously purist bunch. Then one or two began to suspect popular music could offer them something. Now that trickle has become a flood. You could get crushed in the stampede of "high-art" composers running down from their ivory towers. Often this can look suspiciously like slumming. But never in the music of Olga Neuwirth. This 40-something Austrian composer was the subject of a wonderfully generous and heartfelt portrait concert from the London Sinfonietta last Saturday. It proved that her love for pop-culture icons like the 70s avant-garde cabaret artiste Klaus Nomi and her love for Handel arias are all of a piece. She finds the same depth of emotion in both, and tries to fashion a musical framework that reveals or invents a kinship. That requires a certain violence to jerk us out of our habitual responses to these familiar things, and this concert wasn't short of that. Neuwirth's hommage to Klaus Nomi, sub-titled "A Songplay in Nine Fits" cast counter-tenor Andrew Watts as a surrogate Nomi, louche in a glittery tie. Among other things we heard Marlene Dietrich's "Falling in Love Again," Dido's Lament, and Nomi's fabulously petulant "I'm wasting my time on you" - plus glimpses of Nomi himself, projected on a screen. Andrew Watt's clearly loved camping it up in the camp numbers, and being the tragic queen in the tragic ones. The Sinfonietta players were clearly having a ball too. Even the normally serious pianist John Constable cracked a smile as he dropped some aural stink-bombs into the music from his synthesizer. It was fun and even touching at times, but felt over-extended at 45 minutes. The Five Daily Miniatures that opened the concert also featured Andrew Watts, this time in settings of tiny nonsense poems by Gertrude Stein. Neuwirth as always showed an amazing ability to take ordinary instruments - in this case violin, cello, bass clarinet and piano - and make them seem luridly strange, as if neon-lit. It was amazingly inventive, but the real highlight of the evening was the trumpet concerto ...miramondo multiplo... from 2006. Again all kinds of references flitted across the musical screen: Handel's Ombra mai fu, Sondheim's Send in the Clowns. But what really struck home was the fabulous virtuosity displayed on that stage, from the soloist Alistair Mackie, the Sinfonietta players, conductor Garry Walker - and Neuwirth's glittering, dangerous and tender music.