No fewer than four birthdays were celebrated at the last of this year's Proms Saturday matinees, so it was perhaps expected that things might get a little out of hand at the end. The Birmingham Contemporary Music Group, nearly 25 years old, made the gift of its tremendous precision and professionalism to Oliver Knussen and Simon Bainbridge, both 60, and Alexander Goehr, now 80.
Fittingly, three of the four works presented looked backwards. Alexander Goehr's Musical Offering, first performed in 1985 under Oliver Knussen, is a meditation on JS Bach's compositional methods. Despite its academic rubric, it's a wonderfully inventive piece that, in its quirky journey from bustling confusion to beautiful clarity, reminds you how Goehr has always done things a little differently. Knussen was represented by his 1975 Ophelia Dances and their late sequel, Ophelia's Last Dance (2010) the latter beautifully played by Huw Watkins. Written for solo piano, its meandering, Fauré-like melody and Berg-like harmonies express a poignant, hesitant nostalgia.
The only completely new work was Simon Bainbridge's cantata setting of Hieronymus Bosch's Garden of Earthly Delights, to words by John Ross. Here, the nostalgia seemed directed toward the 1970s, a time of material complexity and simple-mindedness. Certainly the text has a childlike "look at that" quality, an approach not without value but here was in complete disjunction with the painting's theological perspective. Bainbridge's music, also fascinatedly detailed, drew on the considerable talents of the Sinfonietta Voices, together with soloists Andrew Watts and Lucy Schaufer, to produce some striking vocal effects. The concentrated, constrained style, though, seems an odd medium for Ross's psychedelic medievalism and, even without a projection of the painting,, for the detailed pictorialism through which the music traced its annoyingly unforgettable way.
• Available on iPlayer until Saturday. If you're at any Prom this summer, tweet your thoughts about it to @guardianmusic using the hashtag #proms and we'll pull what you've got to say into one of our weekly roundups – or leave your comments below.
