MUSIC / London Sinfonietta - South Bank Centre, London

Last Tuesday's London Sinfonietta concert at the QEH focused on British music from the early 1980s, with works by Boulez and Xenakis to add associations from abroad. For good measure there was also a London premiere for Colin Matthews' Contraflow, a scherzo and trio with a slowed- down, transmuted reprise. Like Suns Dance, an earlier, highly regarded Matthews commission, this was an exercise in velocity; no less skilful than its predecessor, yet tighter, punchier, more laden with contrast and internal drama. Hearing this new work against the background of earlier achievement from other composers set up a dynamic interaction of past and present. Overall, it nicely expressed the broad Sinfonietta ethic of continuing work-in-progress.

Simon Bainbridge's Concertante in moto perpetuo, a classic score from 1982 here performed by its original soloist, Gareth Hulse, portrayed swiftness by different means, polarising skittish Minimalist surfaces against slow, simple chordal backgrounds.

By contrast, Jonathan Lloyd's Waiting for Gozo found its impulse in textures of willed unpredictability between the instruments, harnessed to an implied Beckettian programme of expectation and inertia (though not always in the artistic sense intended).

Mark-Anthony Turnage's boisterous double concerto On All Fours took the laurels for pure sonic beauty, its cool, amplified lines for cello and saxophone eloquently played by the Sinfonietta soloists. These must be some of the most engaging and durable sounds to emerge from the 1980s.