The BBC invitation concerts were once staples of Radio 3, live broadcasts providing a significant strand in the network's coverage of both new and old music. The concerts continue, but these days they are usually tucked away in the Maida Vale studios. It was good, therefore, to find one given a much higher profile: tonight, the London Sinfonietta's programme of works, two of them world premieres, by younger British composers attracted a near-capacity audience to the LSO's gleaming rehearsal and education space.
The oldest of the five composers represented here was 37, the youngest just 21. Nevertheless, with one exception, the pieces - written for an ensemble ranging from a septet to a full chamber orchestra - were surprisingly similar stylistically: crammed with jostling, urgently straining instrumental lines that aspired to more expressive weight than they could possibly carry. The odd piece out, and the shortest too, was Emily Hall's Think About Space, with a soundworld dominated by a melodeon and an electric guitar, and constantly setting pulses of three against four. It was not perfectly achieved, but sounded fresh and distinctive in this context.
Phillip Neil Martin's Shifting Mirrors, a study in musical reflection, was technically highly assured but less certain of its musical aims. And Sam Hayden's ambitious Relative Autonomy, two densely packed movements with the second a compression of the first, was not helped by a programme note that seemed blissfully unaware of the irony of inveighing against the evils of the "bureaucratisation of arts subsidy" in one paragraph and then fulsomely thanking a clutch of organisations for funding the composition in the next.
The Sinfonietta had played Ben Foskett's single-movement Violin Concerto before, and, with Clio Gould again the soloist, its well-sustained trajectory seemed just as impressive on second hearing. Most striking of all, though, was William Attwood's Iwwer Tiermen, inspired by German dialect poems. It conjured some dramatic musical images, with mysterious rustlings and throbbings, and empty stillness juxtaposed with moments of maximal activity.
· The programme will be broadcast in Radio 3's Hear and Now on March 19.
