Frances-Marie Uitti, Wapping Power Station, London

This has its limits. The chords can shift, but they don't turn into layers of melody; the nearest thing to that is a tune accompanied by its own drone. In the two strongest pieces, Giacinto Scelsi and Iannis Xenakis didn't need it to devise an astonishing range of sonorities. The former made a sustained meditation from notes close together, animated by bowing in constantly changing ways. Xenakis - in a piece that first confronted its demons, then exorcised them in an obsessive dance - required a pair of sliding pitches, each going at a different speed.

It took Gyorgy Kurtag, master of the miniature, to compose an affecting musical poem solely out of double-bowed chords. Uitti played this straight after one of the evening's four pieces by aspiring composers: Variations on Seven by James McWilliam, who had similarly gone in for a sequence of sumptuous chords, adding a repertoire of beguiling low-pitched slithers and getting his drones to hop around.

Earlier, Edmund Jolliffe's Rain Dance launched a vigorous three-chord mix of African dance and Bach chaconne, and found plenty of resources in a single bow. Fung Lam used a backing track that sounded like crowds in a subway station in pursuit of his successful evocation of claustrophobia, which had the cello alternating a nagging main idea with dreamlike withdrawals. For Ben Villa, born in 1988, the 20th century remained alive and well in a restless workout of familiar gestures and a more personal, sustained conclusion.

As if to show them all, Uitti finished with a piece of her own and took both conventional and extended styles to brilliant extremes, offset by turning intensely lyrical - a quality that the evening, to its detriment, had otherwise missed.