The closing weekend of the Southbank’s Stockhausen festival, Klang, was revealing. Between the London Sinfonietta’s QEH concert, starting with nearly his earliest piece and ending with his last, and the Royal Northern College of Music Wind Orchestra’s Festival Hall rendering of a chunk from his seven-day opera cycle, Licht, was all the difference between a composer in possession of some striking ideas and some dubious ideas in possession of a composer. The Sinfonietta was conducted by Klang’s curator, Oliver Knussen, in Drei Lieder, dating from 1950, almost but not quite juvenilia, and the British premiere of Tierkreis, for orchestra, which realises 10 of the 12 Zodiac melodies for music box that Stockhausen invented in 1975 for his children’s fable Musik im Bauch (Music in the Belly). The second set of five star-sign orchestrations, Fünf weitere Sternzeichen, was finished the night before he died.

If Drei Lieder, sung by the alto Helena Rasker (unpleasantly amplified), sounded like anyone but Stockhausen - Schoenberg, Berg, Stravinsky, jazz are overt influences - while retaining a freshness and zing, and suggesting a composer at the beginning of his creative journey, the Tierkreis pieces marked a late recourse to traditional, Germanic ways of developing an argument, yet sounded like no other music at all. For once in his later work, our attention is drawn not to instrumental gesticulation and tawdry, if “cosmic”, theatricals, but to local brilliances of craftsmanship, to sinewy counterpoint and motive-work, to unexpected colours.

The fourth piece in the first set is a veritable pizzicato polka. The fifth contains a powerful trombone solo (played by Andrew Con-nington). The second set includes an expressive oboe solo (Melinda Maxwell) alongside minor frenzies for the three cellos; a solo for conductor, noiselessly beating time; and the sudden entry from the wings of a bass-tuba player (Ben Thompson), who takes the floor in a mini-concerto. One accepted such theatricality on these solidly musical terms. The ending of the last piece was affectingly inconclusive, and Knussen encored this final compositional endeavour of Stockhausen’s.

Earlier, we heard the premiere of a Southbank commission, Uran-tia, the 19th Hour of Klang, consisting of 20 minutes of juddering, eight-track electronic music (sometimes it made me think of distorted fairground sounds), combined with a recorded soprano who sings obscurely of religious revelations, and it was amusing enough. Much more compelling was the four-track experience provided next evening at the RFH by that pioneering synthesis of abstract and concrete material, Stockhausen’s 1956 tape classic Gesang der Jünglinge (Song of the Youths), with its periodic blasts of boy-soprano timbre. This was the prelude to the London premiere by the massed RNCM winds, under Clark Rundell, of Luzifers Tanz (Lucifer’s Dance), the third scene of Samstag (1983), from Licht.

Stockhausen’s profound eccentricity came worryingly to the fore. He thinks of the orchestra, in this 50-minute excursion, as the face of humanity, literally a human face, which Lucifer - the bass Nicholas Isherwood, acting with diablerie - tries to ensure is permanently contorted. The instrumental divisions represent lips, eyebrows, chin and so on, and indicate the fact with group gesturings - all the clarinets, say, leaning to one side as they play - that have the subtlety of infant-school mime. They sustain monotonous, glutinous harmonies for long stretches, and the cacophony is hardly compensated for by extended solos from a cavorting piccolo-player (Karin de Fleyt) and trumpeter (Marco Blaauw), the latter with a Batman belt of mutes. Gripped by the cosmic-scale self-aggrandisement that is his Licht scenario, Stockhausen clearly had less and less time for music. It is all the more touching that he returned to it at the end.

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