MUSIC / Imminent collapse held at bay: Stephen Walsh on the BBC series of new 'Russian' music

Not invariably known for getting the best concert ideas, Cardiff has done it for once with its current BBC lunchtime series of new 'Russian' music in the St David's Hall. It isn't all Russian; there are Ukrainians, an Estonian, a Tartar. In a sense, half the point of the series is to celebrate the renewed importance of this distinction. But what collective adjective do you use? Try ex-Soviet on a Ukrainian or Russian today, and see what you get; and CIS is sour news to a Georgian and poetry to no one.

It is nevertheless the recent past that these composers have obviously and formatively in common. In his introductory article, Gerard McBurney points out that uncertainty and insecurity are the essential background to all this music. And it's a fact that the one consistent feature of the work of Schnittke, Firsova, and Denisov is its sense of imminent collapse held at bay, if at all, by sheer force of personality. Though sometimes easy on the ear, it is often profoundly unsettling in its disregard (distrust?) for the laws of balance and linguistic consistency.

When Denisov, for instance, ends his otherwise orderly Saxophone Concerto with a bizarre fantasy on Schubert's A flat Impromptu, one has to reckon that the deprecatory effect is deliberate, perhaps even born of a conscious wish not to produce the well- formed piece that, by sheer technique, he obviously could. And when Arvo Part (in his Third Symphony) retreats towards the other extreme of balance and consistency - where there barely survive the distinctions needed for those concepts to come into play at all - one may well sense a neurotic response to a lunatic world. The interesting thing about Part, of course, is that, with such a response, he strikes a chord in the West. But this could be the case with other works in this series. Bewilderment is no longer the private preserve of a few refuseniks.

Of conventionally 'good pieces', then, the series has offered rather few. Alexander Shchetinsky's Glossolalie was brief enough to retain control of a dense and quite strident chamber-orchestral texture. Yuri Kasparov's Genesis Microsymphony likewise emerged as a well-written example of the kind of music that might not have sounded out of place at a French festival of the

Eighties.

But the longer pieces have seemed more typical. For me, Roman Ledeniov's nearly hour-long Symphony in simple modes was about 50 minutes too long, with its bland (and no doubt symbolic) excursions through a sub-Borodinesque terrain of bombed- out folksong. But Firsova's Cassandra, with haunting doom-laden solos for cello and bass drum, Denisov's brilliant concerto (a rewrite of one for viola, though you wouldn't guess it), and Schnittke's intriguing Concerto for piano and strings - typically vagrant in style but untypically precise in effect - all made an impact by no means separable from their wayward handling of formal convention.

The BBC National Orchestra of Wales has guided us sure-footedly through this varied and by no means easy repertoire. Claude Delangle was outstanding in the Denisov concerto; but Artur Pizarro also shone in the less ostentatious Schnittke. The conductor, Tadaaki Otaka, has been masterly throughout. One concert remains, at five past one this Wednesday, with music by Grinberg and Gubaidulina.

Further information from St David's Hall box office, 0222 371236 / 235900