Michael Nyman is nothing if not opportunistic: his latest string quartet, Beckham Crosses, Nyman Scores, was written in under three weeks during the 2002 World Cup. The piece transforms the rhythm and contour of phrases from John Motson's commentary for the England-Argentina game into fragmentary musical lines. The Smith Quartet gave the British premiere of the work, but whatever the conviction of their performance, the players could not disguise that this is an occasional piece, now of documentary rather than musical interest.

In six of the nine short movements, Nyman uses the same musical idea: he translates Motson's sentences into a melody for one of the players, around which the other instruments create a texture of chugging ostinatos and riffs. In one movement, the second violin transliterated "Seaman, who conceded that early penalty," in another, the viola transformed "Beckham: we all know what happened there." But the effect was one-dimensional, as each movement was a bland, motoric miniature. Instead of exploring the humour of Mottie's words, or the melancholy of England's World Cup exit, Nyman missed the goal of making this material expressive.

Stephen Montague's First String Quartet, in memoriam Barry Anderson and Tomasz Sikorski, was a much more convincing fusion of live and electronic sounds. It opened with spectral, breathy noises, made by the players bowing the very bottom of their strings, which grew gradually into a feverish ostinato of screams and shrieks. It was a pitch of intensity that the piece sustained throughout its 20-minute structure, and ended with sounds of dissolution and departure: the players stood up, and faced away from the audience, playing a lamenting chromatic line that faded into silence. It was a powerful image, and a successful transfiguration of the work's emotive inspiration, in the deaths of two close friends, into musical material.