The Barbican Centre's celebration of Harrison Birtwistle's 80th birthday ranges right across all seven decades of his career as a composer, and Birmingham Contemporary Music Group's contribution to it, conducted by Oliver Knussen, focused on key works from the first half of that period.

The programme included not only Birtwistle's second published work, Monody for Corpus Christi, composed in 1959, but also Tragoedia, the ensemble piece that first established him as a force to be reckoned with in new music. Knussen's performance showed that Tragoedia still seems as confrontational now as it must have done at its premiere in 1965, its aggression barely confined within a formal scheme derived from classical tragedy, with cello, horn and harp as the three solo protagonists, and the other instruments acting as a chorus.

It paved the way for Birtwistle's first opera Punch and Judy and launched over a decade of major works, right up to the 1977 ensemble piece Silbury Air. That was there too, at the end of the programme; it's still one of Birtwistle's greatest achievements, and Knussen and BCMG delivered it with an edge-of-the-seat sense of mystery and drama.

There was also a rare performance of the exquisite little Cantata from 1969. Settings of Greek inscriptions and poetic fragments, it's the only original work that survives from Birtwistle's brief assocation with the Pierrot Players, the group he'd founded two years before with Peter Maxwell Davies, and represents a period when the two composers' musical worlds were stylistically closest, before they diverged for ever. The soloist was the soprano Katrien Baerts, beautifully controlled and secure, and equally at ease with the long Boulezian melismata of Monody and the more expansive word setting of the Four Kaplinski Poems, one of three more recent shorter pieces that were interleaved with the milestones.

• To 30 May. Box office: 020-7638 8891. Venue: Barbican Centre