Judith Weir has described her music as Brechtian, and a recent weekend of her work in London clearly demonstrated her work's sense of dislocation, writes Michael Dervan

Judith Weir, whose work has just been celebrated in a BBC Symphony Orchestra composer weekend titled "Telling the Tale", is an artist bursting with ideas. The early King Harald's Saga gives a fair idea of her creative cunning. The piece, which dates from 1979 (when she was just 25), is subtitled a "grand opera in three acts". Those three acts unfold over just 10 minutes, and there's only the one performer involved, a soprano who stands on a regular concert platform rather than in an opera house, provides spoken introductions and sings all the roles.

King Harald's Saga was indeed followed by an opera that was actually planned for the opera house, A Night at the Chinese Opera (1987), revisited in the BBC weekend through Barrie Gavin's film of Richard Jones's production for Kent Opera.

Weir has a wonderful way with titles. Music for 247 Strings (1981) is a piece for violin and piano, the title totalling the number of strings involved between the two instruments. The Art of Touching the Keyboard (1983) explores exactly what its title suggests - the wording is borrowed from an 18th-century tutor by François Couperin. And What Sound Will Chase Elephants Away? (2006), for two double basses, is titled after a query on a website that deals with obscure questions.

The weekend's major new work, a BBC commission for the festival, was CONCRETE - a motet about London, in which Weir chose to celebrate the concrete monument that is the Barbican (where the festival was held), and delving back into London's past through a text (for chorus and narrator) that mines John Evelyn's diary, Henry Mayhew's London Labour and the London Poor, Shakespeare, and an early prospectus for the Barbican development, dating from about 1952, among other sources.

Weir herself was at the festival, attending rehearsals and concerts, and engaging in public interviews with broadcaster Christopher Cook. She came across as a thoughtful, modest individual, passionate and compassionate, and quite fearless in speaking her mind. She talks with a quiet composure which can sometimes almost mask the challenging and provocative nature of what she has to say, particularly when she is dealing with the ravages of the Thatcher years, or the current crisis of arts funding in Britain.

Her works, too, lead something of a double life, bringing to mind the contradictions so often found in the freewheeling fantasy of childhood imagination, or the surrealistic juxtapositions of dreams. She turned her back on the high ground that was occupied by the leading figures of the late 20th-century avant-garde, and developed a fondness for sometimes extravagant melodic writing.

Her melodic style, however, is the antithesis of romantic. The manner is so elaborately cool that "objective" has become one of the most common descriptions applied to her work. And the distancing effect can be encountered also in other musical procedures, the placing of climaxes, the choice of orchestration. Her own use of the description Brechtian to describe some of the distancing, narrative elements of her operas applies equally well to her other works, too.

Combining narrative focus and a sense of dislocation can be oddly disconcerting. For me, the effect was of that of narration separating from the content, of manner leading a life independently of matter. The clarity of the strategy didn't always result in the kind of clashes or contradictions that come to seem interesting for their own sake.

The strongest impression was made in works that had the anchor of words - usually chosen to have their own fascinating worlds of collisions and contradictions. At the Ends of the Earth (1999), for choir (the BBC Singers under David Hill), harp and percussion (the Endymion ensemble), has fascinating intersections both of texts and musical styles, with Weir reaching back to the world of Pérotin, the first composer to write in four parts.

An afternoon song recital - by mezzo soprano Susan Bickley, and tenor Andrew Kennedy with pianist Iain Burnside -was full of wry wit and sharp musical imagination. In the context of the weekend as a whole, it was a wonderful demonstration of how less can be more. More being less was encountered in woman.life.song, (2000) a song-cycle with ensemble commissioned by Jessye Norman to texts by Toni Morrison, Maya Angelou and Clarissa Pinkola Estés. The subject sounded simply too big for the music. And the concert performance of the 1990 opera, The Vanishing Bridegroom, suffered from vanishing surtitles.

A weekend of strong performances - including radiant appearances by soprano Ailish Tynan - left the abiding impression of a body of work where the widely ranging and stimulating ideas were more engaging that the musical material in which they were embodied.