The five works in the New Music Players' Purcell Room concert were all new to London, and all of them had been commissioned over the last three years for the group's basic line up of flute, clarinet, violin, cello, piano and percussion, but if the programme was designed as a showcase it was only partially convincing.
No one who follows new music can expect that everything they encounter is a masterpiece, but if this was the cream of what the group has been programming recently then it made for sometimes depressing listening.
The successes first. Gordon Macpherson's ExploreYourself had the least convoluted programme note and the most direct appeal - a burst of manic energy, which spilled out in all directions and constantly came up with new ideas, it was exuberant, pithy, and short.
If both Rolf Hind's The Horse Sacrifice and James Wood's Crying Bird, Echoing Star slightly overstayed their welcomes, then both contain striking ideas.
Hind's inspiration was an ancient Hindu ritual and places a solo cello centrally as the sacrifical victim and surrounds him with five other instrumentalists who constantly moved positions. The scheme doesn't seem totally convincing, but the sound world, with its edgy, predominantly high-register writing, is sometimes haunting.
In Crying Bird, Echoing Star, the players are dispersed around the platform too, responding to each other with a cosmopolitan collection of bird calls and songs, while the piano sets up harmonic fields that Wood has derived from star charts.
There's less to be said about Rowland Sutherland's Timeless Odyssey, a collage of vaguely exotic, vaguely kitschy ideas that eventually collapses into a section in which the players are asked to improvise, and still less about Edward Dudley Hughes The Sibyl of Cumae, except to wonder why he should have chosen a text of such tendentious pretentiousness in the first place, and then have given it such a drab and unprepossessing musical setting.
The mezzo-soprano Louise Mott sang it well enough, though, and all the performances, under conductors Roger Montgomerie and Patrick Bailey, seemed thoroughly well prepared.
