French music, from the beginning of the 20th century to the present day, is one of the themes of the BBC Symphony's current season at the Barbican. An important element in it are pieces by composers of the so-called "spectralist" school of the last 40 years , and UK premieres of works by two of that group's leading figures, Gérard Grisey and Hugues Dufourt, made up the first half of the concert under Ilan Volkov.

While Dufourt is credited with inventing the term "spectral music", Grisey remained suspicious of the label to the end of his life. In fact the piece the BBCSO introduced, Mégalithes, was composed in 1969, while Grisey was still a student of Messiaen, and before any of the pieces that established him as such a fresh new voice in European music. In this piece for 15 brass instruments, most of them dispersed around the concert hall, the major influence seems to be Xenakis. The sounds are visceral and raw, the gestures confrontational, though the tendency to build up textures from pedal notes in the deepest bass does anticipate later Grisey.

Dufourt's music is less well-known here even than Grisey's. The piano concerto On the Wings of Morning was composed in 2012 for Nicolas Hodges, who played it here with his usual unflappable mastery. The title comes from a lecture by the art historian Emily Vermeule, on the often surreal imagery associated with death in classical Greek art, and the half-hour, single-movement work seems to be a journey through a surreal musical landscape. The soloist and the orchestra follow utterly independent paths, the hyperactive piano confined to the pitches of the chromatic scale, the orchestra setting up wild, swirling masses of sound, dense with microtones. It's a compelling and often exhilarating experience, though hearing it again on iPlayer gave a better balance between the piano and the sounds raging it around it than we ever got in the hall.

Available on iPlayer until 29 January.