The Goldberg Ensemble, under director Malcolm Layfield, fulfils a valuable role in taking contemporary string music around the country and their disciplined, elegant tone sounds particularly good at St George's. It was disappointing, then, that this southern leg of the group's short national tour was so sparsely attended.

To complement performances of Sally Beamish's engaging Concerto Grosso and Geoffrey Poole's exercise in musical balance, entitled ch'i kun, the ensemble presented two new commissions for this touring festival. In Judith Bingham's Down and Out, written for solo tuba and string ensemble, the tuba represents an old tramp who wanders on a sentimental journey through parts of Victorian London. Two music hall songs formed the basis for a set of variations in the strings, against which the tuba played out a fiercely independent existence. But, as if begging to be taken seriously, the tuba became more impassioned, letting James Gourlay indulge his velvet tone.

The second new commission was Thoma Simaku's Radius. It treated each of the Goldberg's 11 strings as a protagonist, connecting modern and ancient aspects of utterance in an imaginary journey in time. In practice, the often austere nature of Simaku's material reached an uneasy accommodation, even if the work's periodic climactic outbursts achieved striking effect.

The third element of the Goldberg tour is its collaboration with the Society for the Promotion of New Music, whereby student compositions are rehearsed in workshop sessions. Liz Dobson's Evolution was chosen to be premiered alongside the established composers here. With its initial harmonics and pizzicati gradually developing into more flowing phrases before ebbing away again, this five-minute work proved to have distinct assurance.