With energy and buzz aplenty in this final fling of the international festival, no one who opted for Bath's contemporary music weekend rather than Birmingham's equivalent Floof! festival could possibly have felt short-changed.
The London Sinfonietta's concert at the Assembly Rooms began with a tribute to Luciano Berio, who died last week, and whose quartet Autrefois had been written in 1971 on the death of Igor Stravinsky. This minute of eloquent music was not only more pointed than a minute's silence, but, in a programme devoted to six "Edgy Brits", it also said something potent about legacy and continuity, about enfants terribles and torchbearers.
At the close, Sam Hayden's Collateral Damage made its own point about the capacity of music to offer truth in a world still preoccupied with war. And the opener was Graham Fitkin's Ardent, a vibrant piece with a strong pulse - though it was the more questioning piano chords, responsible for periodically slowing the pulse, that brought the music to a subtly ambiguous close.
Rebecca Saunders's Quartet for clarinet, accordion, double bass and piano created spare but extraordinary textures that taunted rather than teased the ear. Richard Barrett's Stirrings was a series of brief movements, each tight and complex until a final, sudden moment - more dissolution than resolution.
Neither piece could have been further from Laurence Crane's anodyne Estonia. This aspired to a Zen-like calm, but the sound of a motorcycle racing up through the gears turned out to be a welcome intrusion from outside.
The Sinfonietta's clarinettist, Mark van der Wiel, was the soloist in Morgan Hayes's Dark Room, given its premiere here. A dynamic work, inspired by the decaying grandeur of old Morocco and exploring the essential enigma of the decay of sound, its interest lay in the edgily shifting boundary between the individual and the ensemble. The piece reached its dramatic high point when the oboe of Gareth Hulse challenged the solo clarinet, with both instruments moving to the perimeter of the room and duelling it out. When the clarinet returned with a final, cadential flourish, it came as a bright shaft of light.
Conductor Martyn Brabbins should not take it amiss if the laurels go to pianist Sarah Nicolls, whose brilliant lunchtime recital confirmed her status as a rising star. Her Schnittke and Scriabin showed an acute sense of how to balance beautiful sound with structural line. But it was the degree of perception she brought to no less than three premieres - Joseph Phibbs's In Passing, Joe Duddell's Scattered Black and White and Benjamin Wallfisch's Three Miniatures - that was so impressive. Nicolls is a genuinely "edgy Brit", and what she does should be happening every week of the year.
