It is easy to hear why American composer Daniel Asia, an unfamiliar name on this side of the Atlantic, is a frequently performed figure in his homeland. His warmly accessible music, with its deliberately simplistic style, makes few demands on players or audience. Lontano's programme gave London audiences a chance to hear what they have been missing, and a miniature song cycle, Sacred Songs, demonstrated the key elements of Asia's language.

Setting Hebrew and Aramaic texts, Asia's music juxtaposed a lyrical vocal line, sung by Carmen Pelton, with amiably chugging ostinatos in an instrumental quartet. But, if this was undoubtedly fluent music, it was crippled by its self-conscious desire to communicate. Despite the spiritual subject matter, there was no hint of intensity or depth in these settings. Asia is an avowed "neo-tonal" composer, but his music disables any sense of struggle or conflict, and what is left is a superficially attractive shell that has little to say.

Another song cycle, Breath in a Ram's Horn, at least connected Asia's vernacular idiom with the demotic poetry of texts by Paul Pines. A six-movement woodwind quintet was another matter, however: music of redundant ordinariness, like a pastiche of an already hollow neoclassicism.

The Lontano players were technically assured throughout, and they were put to more meaningful use in a second half of music by Earle Brown, one of the fathers of American experimentalism, who died two years ago. Split into two groups, and conducted by Odaline de la Martinez and Asia, the players wove a path through the musical labyrinth of Brown's Event-Synergy II, the form of which is decided by the musicians during the performance. De la Martinez's group of strings supported Asia's woodwind players with beds of sonorous chords, or fought against them with spiky, chromatic music, creating a drama at once playful and serious.