Anthony Payne's new work, Windows on Eternity, seems at first a typically detailed, complex Sinfonietta commission. Yet the impression it leaves is of a single idea sustaining a whole 18-minute movement with gratifying effectiveness.

Put simply, every line of the piece strives upwards. It flies out of the blocks with whooping horns and ear-splitting chimes, overlapping figures jostling but always rising. Its alternating fast and slow structure is about as simple as it gets. Yet its effectiveness is in the way the slow music takes the same upward-moving phrases and presents them one by one, as if for our closer examination. It gives the music an almost spiritual dimension and produces Payne's idea of time seeming to slow down.

The programme began with Mark-Anthony Turnage's Dark Crossing, of which only the final movement comes close to the title's unease, and ended with Colin Matthews' intense Two Part Invention from 1988.

In between, there was another work new to the UK: Elliott Carter's In the Distances of Sleep, which sets six texts by Wallace Stevens. Carter weaves the words' natural rhythms into slowly dancing lines; the final song seems to contain a hidden waltz. Yet for the heart of the work, he has the confidence and inspiration to pare the orchestra down to just a single thread, passed seamlessly around the strings as the mezzo sings Stevens' profound Restatement of Romance. Jane Irwin was a secure soloist, if slightly lacking in sensuality. The cycle is a good 15 minutes long, but it was almost a shame Oliver Knussen didn't follow his habit with shorter new works of conducting them twice through.