There was no lack of variety in the London Sinfonietta's "New to London" programme on Thursday: six works by four composers, all but one a premiere of one kind or another. But novelty doesn't guarantee quality, and the success rate of this selection was distinctly below par. Only one piece really stood out; another was a partial success; two more were neat, if unremarkable, miniatures.
Best of all was the Sinfonietta's own commission, the third Chamber Sonata by the 42-year-old German Detlev Glanert. Called Secret Room, it is a tightly argued, four-section single movement, which gradually increases in intensity and conveys a feeling of claustrophobia through an economical collection of vivid gestures. The piece manages to generate arresting and genuinely inventive instrumental colours from only a handful of instruments. The other brand new score, Jonathan Cole's Assassin Hair, was a BBC commission, and it had its moments too. It sets a series of fragmentary poems by the surrealist Georges Bataille, presenting the texts in measured, almost stately lines for the mezzo-soprano soloist. Their extraordinary imagery is balanced with instrumental writing that veers from introspective brooding through expressionist violence to wild, delirious extroversion. The sound world does not always seem totally controlled; the most telling passages are the sparest ones, when the unaffected eloquence of Jean Rigby's singing was at its most effective. Why Rigby is heard so rarely in London's opera houses these days remains a mystery.
George Perle's Critical Moments 1 and 2 are collections of miniatures that are neat enough, though not intrinsically memorable. Yet they seemed striking models of clarity alongside Peter Maxwell Davies's Crossing King's Reach, which was commissioned for the opening of the Millennium Bridge in London (or, more accurately, its reopening after its wobble was corrected). Davies sets out to depict a journey across the bridge, from St Paul's Cathedral to Tate Modern on the other side of the Thames. Unfortunately, his sound picture is overlong and over-structured, its plainchant source material is self-consciously manipulated and its moments of parody consistently miss the mark. Even Oliver Knussen's skills as a conductor struggled to make much sense of such a gruesomely miscalculated score.
