If there is such a thing as a new-music establishment in this country, it was out in force for Alexander Goehr's 75th-birthday concert. One glance around the Wigmore Hall was enough to confirm the respect and admiration for Goehr's achievements among his fellow composers and former pupils.

Pieces by Stravinsky and Schumann began each half of the concert, but the rest was devoted to Goehr's own music, including three world premieres. Daniel Becker and Hugh Watkins introduced Almost a Fugue, a miniature, in which two pianos chase each other's tails. Accompanied by Andrew West, the baritone Roderick Williams sang Ulysses' Admonition to Achilles, a setting of the "alms for oblivion" speech from Shakespeare's Troilus and Cressida that Goehr dedicated to Gunther Schuller on his 80th birthday last year.

Dark Days, a 70th birthday tribute to Peter Maxwell Davies from 2004, and sung with outstanding authority by Williams, is much more substantial, though. Goehr has put together a patchwork of texts from Hesiod and Homer on the themes of warfare and strife, and set it as a virtually continuous sequence of meditations, powered by the often hyperactive piano part.

The concert ended with Becker joining the outstanding Elias Quartet for the Piano Quintet from 2000, one of the most impressive of Goehr's recent works. With disconcerting harmonies that lack audible means of support the music seems to evoke a succession of central European ancestors, and it eventually grounds itself in a set of variations on a theme that could have been borrowed from late Fauré. Goehr's musical journey continues to surprise and perplex.