Momentum –Mark-Anthony Turnage Weekend, Barbican Hall / St Giles Cripplegate, London

The highest accolade available in the UK to a composer is the awarding of the BBC Symphony Orchestra's "total immersion" weekend – a sort of musical This is Your Life. Annually, the Barbican Centre is awash with events – talks, films, rehearsals and concerts – from dawn till dusk... even now, stragglers may still be seeking "events". The BBC is the main player in terms of its symphony orchestra and broadcasting function (Radio 3 and BBC 4) but the net is thrown wide, this year including the London Sinfonietta, the Birmingham Contemporary Music Group, the Nash Ensemble and jazz events. Less trumpeted is the invaluable involvement of the Guildhall School of Music and Drama, whose concerts, lectures and workshops complemented the main programme and provided educational events for children. All are most preciously valuable – indeed, a shining star – in this dangerous, dumbed-down world.

Mark-Anthony Turnage won this year's prize. Aged 42, he is the youngest composer to have been featured. No doubt his association with the BBC Symphony Orchestra – as its first Associate Composer – clinched the idea. But Turnage himself, in disarmingly frank discussion, revealed misgivings about such exposure. Turnage is immensely gifted, a fact quickly recognised, which led to prestigious appointments with symphony orchestras and opera houses. 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.