With just three days in each venue, the Goldberg Ensemble's annual tour of Leeds, Wolverhampton and Manchester makes for one of the shortest contemporary music festivals in the UK. Because of the tight schedule, the standard of commissions - four in all - is uniformly high, and the festival certainly deserves a far bigger audience than its current average of 40 per concert.

Although it is true that composing tonal music no longer carries the stigma it once did, very few composers choose to abandon themselves so completely to it as Robert Walker. Even his programme note to Au Revoir bristled with defensiveness, accusing other composers of "pretentious navel-gazing" in their misguided attempts to be original. Forty years ago he may have had a point, but new music has since moved on, and avoiding consonance at all costs is simply not an issue any more. Actually, the luxuriant idiom of Au Revoir - its expansive lines and fuzzy major-key sonorities evocative of Tippett's Corelli Fantasia - palled surprisingly quickly. Without the tension between familiar and new sounds that distinguished every other work in the concert, it sounded too at ease with itself to maintain interest.

By contrast, Nigel Clarke's Winter Music and Dominic Muldowney's Serenade for Horn and Strings showed how familiar styles can be evoked without dominating the work. Infused with a gentle, jazzy swing, Muldowney's Serenade references a nostalgic Sinatra-esque sound but keeps it at a distance. Even his choice of horn rather than saxophone as the solo instrument underlined the delicacy of the balance between 1940s swing and 21st-century commission, although Richard Watkins's gorgeously mellow sound had a distinctly sultry feel.

Winter Music, Clarke's Antarctic soundscape and tribute to Ernest Shackleton, juxtaposes music evoking an eerie, frozen wasteland with passages of propulsive intensity. Here, too, there were flashes of nostalgia in brief moments of Elgarian intensity, movingly evoking memories of Edwardian England.