Birmingham Contemporary Music Group, CBSO Centre, Birmingham, review Still, one tries to ignore such things and take the music as it comes. Which to begin with was easy, as Shepherd's piece had a fabulously seductive sound, and embodied its various imagined 'circumstances" - Floating, Circling, Spinning etc - with deft skill. It was much cleverer than Davies's concerto, subtitled Nature, which by comparison had an almost wilful awkwardness in the solo piano part. And yet this was the piece that actually set the heart and mind in motion. It has its 'spinning" moments too, but in this case one felt an uncanny emotional climate, as if spirits were being conjured. In her pre-concert talk Davies spoke of 'shamanistic rituals" as an influence, and one could hear them loud and clear. Then after the interval the warmth of the audience changed its focus towards the big, reluctantly smiling man at the podium: Oliver Knussen, who was celebrating his 60th birthday. There was a reminiscing post-concert chat, with much laughter, and a birthday cake. Before that we'd heard three of Knussen's own chamber pieces, two of them dating from the 1970s. They were a reminder of how vast his musical culture already was in his twenties, and how subtly he could allude to his favourite things: Ravel, Debussy, Schumann. The most recent piece, Ophelia's Last Dance, I thought was going to add something else - a trust in simple musical statement. But its delightfully frank opening, like a cross between Satie and Cole Porter, was all too soon wrapped in a cordon sanitaire of blurred outlines. Finally we heard Souvenir, by Finnish composer Magnus Lindberg, played by BCMG with huge relish. It was juicily sonorous, and given to sudden vertiginous plunges, as if it were absailing down a skyscraper. A touch vulgar, for sure. But irresistible.