A spring tour has become a regular fixture for the Birmingham Contemporary Music Group, often taking in parts of the country that never see another new-music ensemble. A new work is an integral part of the scheme, and this month that is provided by Param Vir, whose Theatre of Magical Beings was given its premiere by the group under Susanna Malkki in Birmingham before going on the road.
Vir's half-hour piece has high ambitions. Each of its four movements bears the title of a mythical creature from a different religious tradition. Vir emphasises that there is no narrative, that the theatre of the title "lies only in the play of energy". But the material he invents seems too under-characterised to generate such a vivid discourse. The first movement, Garuda, is a featureless moto perpetuo, though the second, Uroborus, is more convincing, a kind of enchanted nocturne spun from sliding string lines. After that the music becomes increasingly diffuse, and the remaining movements - directionless tracery in Elephant and stumbling progress towards radiance in Simurgh - lack distinction or any sense of binding the sequence into a coherent whole.
The lack of definition in Vir's writing was underlined by the pieces that flanked it. David Sawer's Tiroirs reworks its magic at every hearing: every texture has buoyancy, every detail wit and originality, and there is not a note wasted. Magnus Lindberg's Jubilees is an expansion for chamber orchestra of a set of six piano pieces written three years ago. Like Berg's Lyric Suite, Lindberg's fast movements get faster and the slow ones slower. The surefootedness of his harmonies and the economy of gestures make the set far more than the sum of its parts.
There are classics in the programme, too: Stravinsky's Dumbarton Oaks Concerto and Takemitsu's Rain Coming, which could be taken as the archetypal Takemitsu work. Textures of aqueous clarity support a bundle of finely spun melodic lines whose harmonies threaten to transform themselves into Debussy's Prélude à l'Après-Midi in every other bar. It is exquisitely judged, and Malkki's performance caught the gentle poetry beautifully.
· At Gala Theatre, Durham (0191-332 4041), tonight, then touring.
