The Argus: Brighton Festival ThumbRule number one in polite conversation is never to say anything interesting, which might have been the way of this concert by the five immaculate Berlin Philharmonic wind players had they not invited György Ligeti into the room, in the form of his Six Bagatelles.

Trifles they are not.

Written in the early 1950s, before Ligeti escaped from communist Hungary and settled in Vienna, the first of the six is playful and jazzy and leads us into the emotionally complex waters of the other five.

The second counterpoints the mock seriousness of a B-movie drama with a sense of true tragedy, and the third evokes a pastoral heaven.

The bagatelles are tonally conventional – well, relatively conventional – compared with Ligeti’s post-1956 works. But in this piece the sonorities he conjures make wind instruments sound like an organ.

There is a hyperactivity in the Bagatelles that requires not just virtuosity but also that the players convey irony, humour, sadness and ineffable beauty in the same breath.

The applause told of how brilliantly the Berliners had negotiated that crazy ride. Other works by Antonin Reicha and Jean Françaix exuded wit, charm... and politeness. Just as well Ligeti dropped by.