Writing on Water is an unlikely tribute to Lord Nelson from the film director Peter Greenaway and composer David Lang. Commissioned by Lloyd's, it is a meditation on images of the sea as a place of refuge, death and imagination. Greenaway's text is a composite of lines from The Tempest, Moby Dick and The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, and the piece had its first public performance with the London Sinfonietta, conducted by Jurjen Hempel.

Writing on Water is no ordinary text-setting. As well as three singers, the Sinfonietta were accompanied by Greenaway himself, who controlled a flow of images to three huge screens from a vast computer. Even stranger was the contribution of calligrapher Brody Neuenschwander, whose live writing was projected on top of Greenaway's visuals. The image track, of bubbles bursting, running water and lonely seas, was glibly soporific, but the real magic was in trying to interpret the symbols, an elaborate visual fantasy on words from the text.

Lang's score was no simple illustration of the text; the music was an energetic, acerbic underscore, complete with electric guitars. There were some effective moments in this juxtaposition between the pastoral imagery in the texts and the urban intensity of the music, such as Paul Silverthorne's viola solo for a passage describing the sea at night. But there was a wilful redundancy to the piece, as if, having given up any attempt to integrate elements with each other, Greenaway and Lang were happy just to create a stylish celebration of technology that was intermittently engaging but emotionally and expressively empty. This was further emphasised by the second half: Hempel's shattering performance of Louis Andriessen's De Staat, which confirmed the piece as one of the most powerful in contemporary music.