Salvatore Sciarrino’s haunting new song cycle, Immagina il Deserto, inhabits that fugitive soundworld of fleeting images and trembling textures that make his music so instantly identifiable. Its UK premiere, with mezzo Anna Radziejewska as the soloist, was the centrepiece of the London Sinfonietta’s all-Italian concert, just a few days after the same group, with conductor Marco Angius, had given the first performance at the Venice Biennale.

The sources for the five little songs – the whole cycle lasts only 13 minutes – are epigraphs, taken from a wide range of sources, including one from the gravestone of the composer Giovanni Gabrieli in Venice. The Sinfonietta programme provided no texts, but in any case the mezzo lines fragment the phrases almost to the point of incoherence, as though they were confiding some terrible secret, while around them the ensemble spins webs of wispy trills and harmonics.

Berio’s Folk Songs, sung by with earthy richness by Radziejewska, provided the contemporary classic in the programme, and there was more Sciarrino, too – the early instrumental … Da Un Divertimento, which showed how the elements of his mature soundworld were already in place when he was still in his early 20s – as well as two pieces from the generation of Italian composers born in the 1970s. Daniela Terranova’s Notturna in Forma di Rosa was the more puzzling and inconsequential – over almost before it had presented all of its ideas, some of which were undoubtedly very beautiful – while Francesco Filidei’s Ballata No 2 was a compact, imposing structure that used a descending chromatic scale as the spine of a series of increasingly vivid episodes.