Unusually for a young composer, much of his best-known work is written for the largest of forces. But in the Barbican's newly minted acoustic, Turnage's love of percussion and brass almost had the ears blown out This is not a fault of his, rather that of the conductor. Turnage has a finely tuned ear for orchestral colouring, but the internal balance must be judged too. In Your Rockaby, Turnage's remarkable concerto for saxophone, the soloist Martin Robertson was blowing for his life, with the conductor, Leonid Slatkin, apparently oblivious. And in a concert performance of the opera Greek (with an exceptional performance by the baritone Roderick Williams) most of the words were inaudible.Turnage writes scores that are loud, fast and furious, but his love of jazz, in particular Miles Davis, leads always to the presence of tender, beguiling lines.

It's hard to think of another living composer more overtly emotional than Turnage Relationships are vital to him. He writes for the musicians he knows and past fruits have been associated with Ensemble Modern, the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra and English National Opera. But arguably the highlight of the weekend was not one of the huge volcanic scores but a new chamber work. Slide Stride is a piano quintet dedicated to Richard Rodney Bennett, whose virtuosity as pianist and jazz composer Turnage so much admires. The Nash Ensemble with Ian Brown gave an astonishingly confident first performance, Brown revelling in the piece's bouncy, Fats Waller cheerfulness. Earlier, Brown had played the piano miniatures True Life Stories, revealing that Turnage is as much at ease with the intimate as the grand.Turnage's work may not sit easily with itself, the loud scores becoming indestinguishable from each other.

Arguably, more leavening from his favourite composers – Beethoven, Stravinsky and Britten – might have provided a more illuminating context.. "Composers should avoid symmetries, but may construct in parallelisms," Stravinsky once remarked. And programme-planners? This Wigmore Hall recital by the young Japanese period violinist Hiro Kurosaki and the veteran harpsichordist William Christie, the founder of Les Arts Florissantes, was almost symmetrical. Furthermore, both the suite and the partita were in E major, a sharp key relating to the various keys of the other pieces – except for the second Bach sonata, which, like a spanner in the works, proved to be in the remote, flat key of F minor.No doubt in these post-tonal times, we are less sensitive to key sequences than our baroque forebears. On the other hand, the Viennese-trained Kurosaki, with his vintage 1690 instrument, could hardly have proved more exquisitely sensitive to baroque style – or indeed styles. This was playing that not only drew a remarkable range of tone and colour from varied speed or pressure of bowing alone, but that nicely distinguished between the traditions evoked by his chosen composers.Bach's Sonata No 5 in F minor, BWV1018, is in his more Germanic manner, in which the violin tends to be just one part in a densely contrapuntal texture sustained mainly by the keyboard. This Kurosaki characterised by a subdued, inward tone; whereas the French-style Loure in the Partita No 3 in E major, BWV1006, he dispatched with just the right combination of languor and finesse.