Birmingham Contemporary Music Group, CBSO centre, Birmingham, review This concert offered something rare: a total contrast between its two halves between yin and yang, bright and dark. The first half had three shortish pieces, all bright and light in sound, the second just one, as dark and deep as a tomb. First came Judith Weir's Musicians Wrestle Everywhere, inspired by the sounds of her urban environment. A younger composer would evoke that by referencing urban music, and there was a touch of that here. But Weir mostly turned her cityscape back into nature, hearing wind around corners and wind-chimes in someone's back garden. In its modest way it was a delight. "British cheese crusader," "Prodigious Collector of Light Bulbs" - these were two of the entertaining newspaper obituary headlines heard in the evening's new piece, Findetotenlieder. The composer, Sean Clancy, came across them in Gabriel Orozco's artwork entitled Obit, and set them for soprano and ensemble. A promising idea, if done with a light touch, but unfortunately Clancy was also keen to evoke the media's fascination with the Lacanian death drive - a concept I suspect had passed many of us by - and also to nod to a pop number, LCD's Someone Great. As a result, the piece, though often intriguing, wasn't quite sure which way it was facing; high or low, serious or ironic. Then came a piece from Gerald Barry, a composer who's probably read his Lacan but wouldn't dream of telling us so in a programme note. Instead he focuses on a childhood memory which for him is fraught with meaning: the humble piano pieces contained in Feldman's Sixpenny Editions, which gave the piece its title. "Free from Care," "A Dog Barks": these are the trite little scenarios which Barry made as vivid as a dream. After the interval, as the lights fell, a few hesitant infinitely sad sounds from low flutes and muted horns took us into a completely different world. This was the opening of Gerard Grisey's Quatre Chants pour franchir le seuil (Four Songs to Cross the Threshold). These meditations on death and the afterlife unfolded with majestic slowness, the dark sound-world made darker by mysterious flecks of light. Soprano Susan Narucki didn't always make the words completely clear, but the intensity of her involvement was palpable, as was that of the players, who were simply beyond praise. Conductor Clement Power shaped its huge, Mahlerian paragraphs with unerring judgment and a touching reverence.