BIRMINGHAM’S four-day festival of contemporary music, the curiously titled Floof!, started both brilliantly and terribly. The brilliant bit was what happened on stage: four cracking pieces admirably played by the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra under Sakari Oramo’s immaculate direction. The awful part was the acres of unoccupied seats in the hall. If Brummies really want their city to be anointed European Capital of Culture — and to judge from the number of promotional bags, badges, notebooks and leaflets that are thrust into my hand every time I visit the place, a lot of dosh is being chucked at this ambition — then they should be turning out in force to support remarkable projects like this.

Perhaps the welter of Finnish names on the poster gave the impression that the music-making would be a bit like the Helsinki winter: prolonged, dour and only to be endured with the help of strong liquor. The opposite was the truth. In their different ways all four pieces sent the spirits soaring.

Magnus Lindberg’s Gran Duo, written for this orchestra’s wind section three years ago, pits brass against woodwind, piping high sonorities against subterranean gurgles, and arresting clarion calls against cascading waterfalls of notes. All this is contained within a chaconne-like structure of crystal clarity and surprising euphony. There are shades of Britten, Messiaen, Stravinsky here — and even Copland, in the bare, brazen fourths and fifths — yet the whole is uniquely Lindberg.

Jonathan Harvey’s White as Jasmine is equally quintessential: a song-cycle setting four poems by the 12th-century Indian saint Mahadevi — she who wandered naked all over the sub-continent in search of Shiva — and two by her guru, Allama Prabhu. “Through eighty-four hundred thousand vaginas have I come!” she cries, and Harvey fits this alarming image to aptly voluptuous and fiercely ecstatic music in which a big orchestra is spangled by jangling percussion and turbocharged by rich splurges of synthesizer.

All this, however, is offset by the voice, which is often calm, almost ascetic. With her languid tone and outstanding technique, Anu Komsi was ideally cast, though her English pronunciation had its Nordic moments.

The other pieces — Julian Anderson’s The Crazed Moon and Esa-Pekka Salonen’s LA Variations — are already virtually modern classics. The first is an anguished lament; the second a showcase full of wild stomps, unexpected shafts of wit and exuberant timbres.

What all this constituted was a celebration of the new that few orchestras would have the nerve or the skill to mount. There’s more of the same all weekend. Go and experience a blast of fresh air. I imagine there’s the odd ticket left.

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