The Aronowitz Ensemble, a string sextet and piano, owes its existence to the Aldeburgh festival. The players met at the festival three years ago and made their debut as a group a few months later. Now they are part of the BBC's New Generation Young Artists scheme, and they returned to Aldeburgh for a recital on the festival's final weekend.

Between Mahler's earliest surviving work, the A minor movement for piano quartet, and Mozart's E flat Piano Quartet K493, the Aronowitz's programme included the last of this year's premieres: the first European airing for Nicholas Maw's String Sextet, introduced at Lincoln Center, New York earlier this year. It's a substantial (30-minute), single-movement piece subtitled Melodies from Drama. Four of the most important themes are taken from Maw's Covent Garden opera Sophie's Choice, first seen in 2002, where they are associated with the principal characters - Sophie, Nathan, Stingo and the Narrator - while two of the opera's orchestral passages are transcribed and incorporated into the sextet as well.

The themes are warmly expressive and lyrical, another reminder of Maw's declared musical aim of picking up the threads of late European romanticism from the point before they morphed into modernism, and developing them. The musical world of the sextet is closer to the Richard Strauss of Metamorphosen, or the Schoenberg of Verklärte Nacht than anything else, though there is also something curiously English about the music too, with an echo of Vaughan Williams in the opening moments, as the first theme is unwound over archaic, Tallis Fantasia-like harmonies. The string writing is rich and sonorous; every theme is supported and carried on detailed textures that must be a delight to play. The Aronowitz clearly relished all of it - their playing was constantly expressive and raptly beautiful.

· Broadcast on Radio 3 on July 13.