The Goldberg Ensemble's Contemporary Music festival has expanded ambitiously this year. Under the dedicated Malcolm Layfield, it is now a seven-venue, ten-concert tour with several new pieces spotlighting young talent as well as established names, together with workshops and composers' forums.

Richard Watkins was the soloist in the premiere of Nicola Lefanu's Amores for Horn and Strings. In these evocative five movements, full of hunting allusions, a central lyrical nocturne liberated the horn into a brilliant extended cadenza in the fourth, with the Goldberg's vibrant strings drawn back into a passionate and taut engagement in the finale.

In Palace of the Winds, inspired by the Hawa Mahal of the Rajasthani capital, Jaipur, Anthony Gilbert emulates its contradictions of elaborate facade and simple structure to create contradictions of his own, using complex cross-cultural references including Indian classical, jazz and western polyphony. The work's appeal lies in the sense of an unending flow of sound, all the tracery of voice-leading and dancing rhythms nevertheless tightly underpinned, until the texture gradually dissipated leaving a single violin floating high into air.

Thanks to the Goldberg's collaboration with SPNM, two works by the society's short-listed composers also got crucial festival airings. Duncan MacLeod's piece, undistinguished things to senses ruck, was assured, but too obviously going for effect, as players whispered random words and stamped their feet. Brian Newsome's Paraphrase was fluent, but similarly self-conscious in its lexicon of string effects.

The new works were framed by two older ones: Roger Marsh's eloquent Canto I and Geoffrey Poole's Crossing Ohashi Bridge. The latter, constructed as a bridge-like span and embracing the vicissitudes of a metaphoric journey to enlightenment, was memorable for its precisely judged sonorities, with the moment when David Adams's solo violin dissolved into a rainbow of high string sounds simply magical.