Though he is still only 32, it would be wrong to describe Johannes Maria Staud as an up-and-coming composer. The Innsbruck-born Staud has prestigious commissions from across Europe to prove he has established himself. The latest of those has come from the Birmingham Contemporary Music Group; Richard Baker, a first-rate replacement for Ilan Volkov who had been scheduled to conduct the concert, introduced Staud's One Movement and Five Miniatures, which BCMG had funded through its Sound Investment Scheme.

Staud describes the 15-minute piece as a response to the challenge of using an "early music" instrument (the harpsichord) alongside the "new music" instrument (the computer). The sounds of the harpsichord are digitally transformed in real time by the computer and the transformations become increasingly complex as the work goes on. In the extended opening movement the textures are widely spaced, with lots of rhythmic unisons and material audibly shared between the harpsichord (played by Clive Williamson) and the ensemble; in the continuous sequence of miniatures that follows, the process is rhythmically and harmonically far more complex. But, though the bone structure is always obvious, the music never quite makes the most of this collision of the old and the new.

BCMG has always made a point of reviving its previous commissions, and two of those were also included here. Edward Rushton's Palace, from 2001, is a four-movement chamber symphony, in which Stravinskian neoclassicism seems the main ingredient in an eclectic stylistic mix. And Benedict Mason's 1991 Nodding Trilliums and Curve-Lined Angles is a weirdly wonderful sequence of movements led by a concertante group of percussionists. It is totally unlike anything else, except Mason's more recent and even more extraordinary series of pieces, Music for European Concert Halls.