This was a neatly devised programme of early music from Oliver Knussen and the Birmingham Contemporary Music Group – a sequence of five works written by twentysomethings on the threshold of exceptional careers. Three of the pieces are more or less half a century old now, but when they were composed, Harrison Birtwistle, Peter Maxwell Davies and Alexander Goehr were still part of the New Music Manchester group, ­feeding off each other's innovations.

Knussen's programme brilliantly showed how those interactions worked, with The Deluge, Goehr's wiry cantata on a Leonardo text, first performed in 1959, surely one of the models for Maxwell Davies's later Leopardi Fragments. Even then the distinctions between the two composers were clear: Goehr more concerned with the way his music worked harmonically; Davies exploiting the tension between rigour and lyrical expressiveness. Birtwistle even then was a little apart: The World Is Discovered, six miniatures based on 16th-­century canzonas by Heinrich Isaac, welds Stravinsky, Varèse and early Boulez into a distinctively pugnacious style studded with kernels of lyricism.

Between the Manchester pieces came welcome revivals for two of the most impressive of BCMG's recent commissions. Helen Grime's three-movement A Cold Spring sounded as quietly ­distinctive as at its first outing at ­Aldeburgh last summer. With soprano Claire Booth and contralto Helen ­Summers joined by tenor Christopher Gillett as soloists, Luke Bedford's Good Dream She Has was even more lusciously rapturous than when Knussen ­conducted the ­premiere two years ago.