The importance of small ensembles that specialise in new music performance can hardly be overestimated. Psappha are one of Britain's leading lights in this field, and they are eloquent and virtuosic apologists for the music they commission and play.

As ever, audience numbers for this repertoire never reflect the quality of either music or performers. Yet Psappha's programme was skilfully structured, with the tonal ambience of the opening work - Kenneth Hesketh's Fra Duri Scogli - echoed in John Casken's solo piano piece The Haunting Bough and Maxwell Davies's Fantasia and Two Pavans. Slotted in between were Phillip Neil Martin's predominantly textural Long Under Darkness Cover and Ian Wilson's more rhythmically motivated Involute. Both Hesketh and Casken began by evoking the sombre overtones of archaic modes. But where Fra Duri Scogli retains this point of reference with jaunty madrigalian rhythms and open harmonies, Casken moves swiftly on from Rameau to a more broadly Gallic (and mostly 20th-century) sound-world, with sultry Debussian colours giving way to humorous 1920s Parisian chic.

Though there are now comparatively few performances of works from Maxwell Davies's early period, his 1968 Fantasia and Two Pavans is a glowing example of the wit and sheer joy that infuses so much of this music. His arrangement of Purcell's Fantasia sparkled with life and vivacity; the two Pavans were more blatantly funny, with the first smooched up in skiffle band style, and the second masquerading as a jazz 78, grinding to a halt before being quickly wound up again.

Jane Manning was outstanding as the tragi-comic heroine of Maxwell Davies's Miss Donnithorne's Maggot. The sad mental decline of an ageing jilted bride is movingly conveyed in music whose wit and panache renders her personal tragedy in the starkest terms possible.