The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse were in attendance on Saturday night, in the form of four drummers playing 16 tom-toms. With the Seven Trumpets of the Apocalypse, they contributed to the enormous forces assembled for George Crumb’s Star-Child, the climax of the BBC Symphony Orchestra’s Total Immersion day devoted to the American composer, 80 this year.

The ground had been prepared by a pre-concert event in the Barbican foyer co-ordinated and conducted by the intrepid Stephen Montague. Vast numbers of young musicians and dancers came together in his Lux in Tenebras (Light into Darkness), reversing Crumb’s trajectory from darkness to light but drawing on ­techniques of Cage and Ives involving parallel ensembles (and likewise requiring multiple conductors).

Crumb uses more than 70 different percussion instruments in Star-Child, including iron chains, pot lids (struck with metal beaters) and thunder sheet. Those demands, along with the children’s voices (Trinity Boys Choir), the male speaking choir (New London Chamber Choir) whose members double as bell-ringers, plus soprano (Claudia Barainsky) and trombone (Helen Vollam) soloists, are largely responsible for the rarity of performances such as this.

The John Tavener-like aura of serene mysticism and New Age ecstasy may (or may not) have appealed more in the Seventies, when it was written, than in today’s hard-bitten climate.
Echoes of Time and the River from 1967 conjures a ritualistic atmosphere partly by the frozen quality of exquisitely scored, endlessly repeated (and minutely varied) patterns, and partly by the slow movement of players round the stage.

A Haunted Landscape (1984) similarly assembles a vast and exotic percussion section but uses it to hypnotic effect by experimenting with unconventional and rarefied pluckings and scrapings. Vestigial memories of past composers (Copland, Varèseand others closer to home) also haunt this landscape.

This impeccably executed BBC event demonstrated both how major a figure Crumb is and why he is not more often performed.