When he died four years ago, the Italian composer Franco Donatoni was producing the best music of his career. Having flirted with both post-war serialism and the subversiveness of John Cage, he spent the last two decades of his life composing in a style that combined his perfect craftmanship with a capacity to amuse and surprise. He was intensely prolific in that period, but much of that music is hardly known here, and whenever a piece is played it is an exhilarating surprise.

So it was that Donatoni's Hot, a 14-minute concerto for saxophone he wrote in 1989, ended the Birmingham Contemporary Music Group's Barbican programme and turned a routine affair into something more uplifting. The piece evokes the sound world of 1950s jazz with the solo saxophone combined with muted trumpet and trombone, pizzicato bass, Thelonius Monk-like piano and percussion. The musical syntax is all Donatoni's own, progressively becoming more complex, more virtuosic. It is direct, witty and sometimes very beautiful; John Harle was the assertive soloist, while conductor Alexander Briger and the BCMG clearly relished their roles as ersatz jazzers.

The British music that preceded Hot was never so striking. Julian Anderson's Khorovod is almost a contemporary classic now, but the impact of its clashing tempos and mosaic of dance episodes was a bit diluted in the Barbican space, while Philip Cashian's Three Pieces hides a wealth of extra-musical reference behind its neutral title, and gains in presence as it goes on.

Two years after its Berlin premiere, Mark-Anthony Turnage's The Torn Fields - settings of five first world war poems written for baritone Gerald Finley - received its first London outing. Though there are no obvious musical links, the cycle clearly explores the same world as the opera but its vocal lines are less compelling, even though Finley coloured them exquisitely. The real interest lies in the instrumental backdrop, which seems far more naturally expressive.