In Broken Images is the latest in a line of works that Harrison Birtwistle has composed over the last 40 years for the London Sinfonietta. In many ways, too, this new piece harks back to the very first of those Sinfonietta commissions. It takes its title from a line by Robert Graves and was first performed by the group in Milan last year. The work's four instrumental groups – woodwind, brass, strings and percussion – echo and react to each other as though in a latter-day Gabrieli canzona. As such, In Broken Images explores ideas of antiphony and role play that Birtwistle first tackled on this scale in Verses for Ensembles in 1969.

He introduced the new piece in conversation with Tom Service, explaining how he instinctively uses compositional techniques that earlier in his career had demanded large amounts of pre-planning. But the way in which his blocks of musical material move in and out of focus, become submerged and resurface again in different forms, or just occasionally combine into gestures of seismic intensity, still seems the product of a mysterious ritual of which the audience only experiences one element.

David Atherton, whose connection with Birtwistle also stretches back over more than four decades, conducted the thrilling premiere at the end of the Sinfonietta's portrait concert devoted to Birtwistle; he had preceded it with an equally pungent account of Carmen Arcadiae Mechanicae Perpetuum, a mesh of interlocking musical clockworks that Birtwistle composed for the group in 1977. The first half hadn't required a conductor: Cortège is a reworking of the memorial Birtwistle composed for the Sinfonietta's former artistic director Michael Vyner, in which the instrumentalists pay their respects in a series of combative solos, while Five Distances is Birtwistle's take on the traditional wind quintet, which sets up the five instruments in playful opposition to each other.