CBSO Centre, Birmingham 4 / 5 stars

There were no new works in the opening concert of the Birmingham Contemporary Music Group's season. Instead, Oliver Knussen conducted a beautifully planned and equally well-executed sequence of works by two of today's leading Nordic composers, the Dane Poul Ruders and the Finn Magnus Lindberg.

The real classic in the programme was Joy, one of Lindberg's breakthrough pieces from the early 1990s with which he first established an international reputation. It still wears wonderfully well. The ensemble writing is perfectly meshed with the electronic samples and contained within a consistent harmonic world that allows Lindberg to build a structure of almost symphonic weight, articulated by window-like moments of tinkling transparency and whispering trills, driven by a bubbling energy that is hard to resist.

The other Lindberg works in the concert were much slighter. Bubo Bubo, full of glittering, tumbling figures, was Lindberg's 50th-birthday tribute to Knussen, while Counter Phrases is a short dance score composed in 2003 for the choreographer Anna Teresa de Keersmaeker that constantly seems to change its perspective and direction, yet the harmonic clarity is just as potent as it is on a larger scale.

By contrast, the two early pieces by Ruders, both from the 1980s, seemed far less focused. Four Dances in One Movement begins with delicate, fractured sounds, but loses its way the more it gains in muscle and assertiveness. Formally, Nightshade is equally hard to grasp, but musically and expressively it's far more interesting, a miniature tone poem set in the lower depths with a sound world dominated by contrabass clarinet and contrabassoon and illuminated by occasional shafts of light from high-register violin and woodwind. As a study in bleakness, it's hard to beat.

· This article was amended on Friday October 10 2008. Magnus Lindberg is a Finnish composer. He is not Swedish, as we said above. This has been changed

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