Unfortunate that Klang, the week-long tribute to the late Karlheinz Stockhausen, concluded with music suggesting that this emperor among sonic voyagers was sometimes, well, bonkers. None but an artist dazzled and warped by his every thought could have devised the 1984 Lucifer's Dance, a chunk from his opera cycle Licht that divides wind musicians into sections of the human face - chin, left eyebrow, upper lip, and so on - and forces them, under Lucifer's prodding, to jerk their bodies and grimace in sound for 50 minutes.

A loopy ground plan doesn't necessarily kill arresting art. It did in the Festival Hall. Even when the muddy morass of drones and arpeggios thinned to a solo line from trumpet (Marco Blaauw) or piccolo (Karin de Fleyt), no felicity of phrasing emerged. The Royal Northern College of Music Wind Orchestra blew out hearts and lungs for the conductor Clark Rundell. It was no use: music was strung on the rack and tortured.

Still, the sun shone on other days. Saturday with the London Sinfonietta was particularly bright as we journeyed from the Drei Lieder of 1950 (spiky and fruity after the old modern masters) to the project that Stockhausen finished in December the night before he died. This was an orchestration of ten parts of his Zodiac cycle Tierkreis - gnomic threads of melodies from the 1970s, originally conceived for musical boxes. Lucifer's mud was banished; clarity and exuberance roared through the Queen Elizabeth Hall. From buzzing cellos to keening oboe to bleary trombones, the kaleidoscope kept turning, reaching its showiest point in the comic tuba solo of Taurus. Oliver Knussen conducted a jewel of a performance, gratefully followed by a repeat.

By all accounts Stockhausen's sonorities glistened equally in the British premiere of Freude, an epic for two harps from his unfinished Klang cycle, heard on Friday. I missed that, but klanged my way through Urantia, Saturday's world premiere: 20 minutes of dwindling interest for electronic pulsings and bubblings, laced with a recorded soprano. Genius, magician, fool, curate's egg: Stockhausen, the Klang festival told us, was all this and more.

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