Alexander Goehr, who turns 70 this year, is one of the triumvirate of Manchester-trained composers who transformed postwar music in this country. Along with Harrison Birtwistle and Peter Maxwell Davies, Goehr was responsible for defining British musical modernism. If his work is less iconoclastic than that of his contemporaries, it is equally radical and individual. The Nash Ensemble's celebratory programme revealed the range and power of his chamber and vocal music.

Where Birtwistle and Davies have wanted to break away from history and tradition, Goehr retains his ties to the musical past. The world premiere of the oddly named . . . Around Stravinsky demonstrated this indebtedness. Goehr's music is literally composed "around Stravinsky", since at the centre of the piece is the Russian's own Pastorale for violin and wind quartet. But this is not collage-like postmodernism. Instead, a virtuosic violin solo - superbly played by Marianne Thorsen - leads into the Pastorale, and after another short solo there is a Rondo for all five players. Stravinsky's music is refracted through the prism of Goehr's composition. Partly an act of homage, and partly a respectful rearrangement, the piece expresses a continuity between the two composers.

The lightness of . . . Around Stravinsky is far removed from the intensity of the 1979 song-cycle The Law of the Quadrille. In this piece, history is interpreted as anxiety. Setting prose fragments by Kafka for baritone and piano, the work recaptures the searching spirit of the great romantic cycles. But there is no single narrative for the singer to interpret. Instead, the texts and the music explore images of dislocation. Nowhere is this clearer than at the very end of the piece, when a cadence refuses to resolve, as if the laws of musical structure are no longer applicable. Baritone Roderick Williams brilliantly caught this sense of musical and emotional alienation.

The quintet Five Objects Darkly was written nearly 20 years after the song- cycle, but it ends with a similar musical question-mark. However, the expressive effect is completely different. The quintet's last movement is a Dance Finale, inspired by Schubert. And the music really does dance. History, in this piece, releases Goehr's imagination, and the quintet flies free of the angst of the first four movements. Conducted by Martyn Brabbins, the Nash Ensemble relished this powerfully dramatic work.