Perhaps the most prestigious of all the 60 premieres at Cheltenham this year was slipped into a concert by Martyn Brabbins and the City of Birmingham Symphony that otherwise consisted of English music. Elliott Carter's song cycle Of Rewaking, for mezzo and orchestra, was being heard on this side of the Atlantic for the first time, and found itself surrounded by Britten (his Sinfonia da Requiem and Young Person's Guide to the Orchestra), Holst (the wonderfully bleak tone poem Egdon Heath) and Elgar's Cello Concerto, in which the soloist Natalie Clein applied "expression" by the bucketful.

Carter has always been discriminating in the texts he sets, and the new song cycle, lasting a little under 20 minutes, revisits his long-held enthusiasm for the poetry of William Carlos Williams. He sets three poems whose bright, crisp imagery traces a trajectory from conflict in The Rewaking through defeat in Lear to a final renewal and rediscovery of the beauty of a single sensory moment in Shadows. The vocal lines are by turns taut and bracing, expansive and lyrical, and Carter surrounds the voice with the transparent textures so typical of his late orchestral writing, sometimes providing gentle support or counterpoint, and elsewhere threatening to overwhelm the voice in fierce outbursts.

Commissioned by the Royal Philharmonic Society from the fund set up with the proceeds of the sale of its manuscript collection to the British Library, Of Rewaking was written in 2002 as a gift to Daniel Barenboim, who conducted the first performance in Chicago last year. Here the soloist was Gweneth-Anne Jeffers, creamy-toned and secure in her handling of Carter's soaring, aspiring writing, while Brabbins, Cheltenham's artistic director-in-waiting, deftly fitted the CBSO's counterpoints around her.