Operest, St John's, Smith Square, London

The front man of Channel 4's cult show Banzai, Masashi Fujimoto, keeps his day job close to his chest. He's an operatic tenor and jobbing musician and artistic director of a year-old group called Operest. But, whether by accident or design, the opportunity this offered to plug Friday's concert to the masses was spurned. St John's was about half full - a missed opportunity for a company whose proclaimed mission is to take classical music to new audiences.

The name is a shorthand for Opera East London. Most of its work is done on that side of the city, out of the limelight and evidently with some success. But for Westminster, it presented a quirky mix of vocal, piano and ensemble music from England, Russia and Lithuania. It all added up to something substantial, including three worthwhile premieres. But you'd have been brave to guess in advance.

At the centre was a sequence of solos by the pianist Tamami Honma, featuring a snapshot of Lithuanian composers and an update on John McCabe's series of studies written in homage to great figures of the keyboard. The new McCabe piece, Snowfall in Winter, evokes the Debussy Préludes like a variation on familiar music, and then applies a composer's kaleidoscope to turn the material into something of his own with an extended melodic line and clashing scales. Scrunch, the other piece, seizes on clashing chords in the sonatas of Domenico Scarlatti to punctuate a series of racy syncopated dashes. Honma, dedicatee of both, played with both flair and immediate understanding.

The Lithuanians offered a non-tonal take on fashionable procedures from the late 20th century. Bronius Kutavicius's Piano Sonata dates from the Soviet years and gives the performer a circumscribed freedom, which Honma seized on to give this dry music a steep progression from meditative to fierce and frantic. Anatolijus Senderovas's premiere was an arrangement for Honma of a percussion work. Less ponderous than its title, No moon, no flowers, no friend - and he drinks sake, it pounded away on shifting pitches with contrasted rhythmic flurries and a final shock incursion of melody.

Earlier, in Songs of Travel by Vaughan Williams, Fujimoto displayed a light voice with good top register, fine tonal control, sensitive phrasing, and two intrusive mannerisms: poor projection of consonants, and a way of swooping up to the pitch of a note that became extinct about 70 years ago. But he was transformed when he sang the Sarah Rodgers commission. Focused, agile and hitting the pitch first time, he helped make this the evening's high point.

The Fire Will Blaze Again sets poems by Vaughan Jones that apply Christian imagery to events in East Timor. The music, taut, lyrical and open-hearted, focuses on prayer rather than horror, and builds to an affecting affirmation in the face of hopelessness. An apt sequel to a dogged but searching performance of Shostakovich's Piano Trio No 2.