It was a risky proposition to commission a work for the London Sinfonietta and the Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment, two of the South Bank’s resident ensembles, as part of the Festival Hall reopening celebrations in 2007. But Heiner Goebbels is a genius who happens to specialise in the imaginative juxtaposition of different sound worlds.

In his Songs of War I Have Seen, the members of the two ensembles are divided by gender. The men, formally attired, are ranged in a row at the back, while the women, casually dressed, sit at the front in a quasi-domestic setting with boudoir lamps. The women take it in turns to read from Gertrude Stein’s novel Wars I Have Seen, the banal repetitions both evoking the monotony of civilian life during the war and Stein’s belief that history merely repeats itself.

The period instruments come to the fore intermittently with music from Matthew Locke’s The Tempest, while a Goebbels soundtrack incorporates sampled fragments of jazz, rock, wartime noise and much more besides.

The piece was a revelation two years ago and on a second hearing proved equally mesmerising. Harpist Helen Tunstall once again regaled us with the nonsense story about the chicken, while trumpeter Paul Archibald’s incantatory microtonal lament, accompanied by the bell-like sound of lightly brushed glass vessels, brought the piece to a spellbinding close.

Songs of War has no explicit message but the resonances of past and present wars make it as timely a reflection as ever. The first half consisted of a Sampler Suite from another Goebbels work, Surrogate Cities. Here the underbelly of urban life is represented by sampled sounds: industrial noise, historical recordings and, most memorably, the ululation of a Jewish cantor intoning his chant.

Both pieces were given under the assured direction of the young Estonian conductor Anu Tali.