Although Hanspeter Kyburz's five-movement orchestral work Cells was supposed to concern ideas of biological growth and formal freedom, the most striking moments in its half-hour structure were images of dissolution and decay. The fractured stillness of stratospheric harmonics and scarcely perceptible woodwind breaths in the opening movements were hauntingly caught by the London Sinfonietta and Roland Kluttig.

After Simon Haram's primeval multiphonics on baritone saxophone, the fourth movement dispensed with musical progression altogether, as the players rolled pebbles in their hands and brushed fingers against abacuses.

There was a more organic transformation in Thomas Adès's The Origin of the Harp. His sumptuous chromaticism and dense polyphony coalesced into a vibrant shimmer of strummed strings accompanying an impassioned cello melody. Adès himself conducted with pleading intensity.

In Catch, Adès's 1991 quartet for cello, violin, piano and perambulatory clarinet, Timothy Lines captured a moving theatricality when he joined the other players on stage, only to enigmatically exit again. But it was Life Story, a mini operatic scena for counter-tenor, two bass clarinets and double-bass, that properly revealed Adès's dramatic talents. Life Story sets Tennessee Williams's poem of post-coital hotel-room antics, and Andrew Watts relished every word.

However, the real theatre of the concert was reserved for Helmut Oehring and Iris ter Schiphorst's Polaroids for actress, counter-tenor and electronically amplified ensemble. Oehring was born to deaf parents and learned sign language, which the actress Christina Schönfeld used throughout the piece. The self-referential world of her signing found a parallel in Oehring's repetitious sound-world of Hammond organ effects and resonant marimba glissandos. Mixed with the counter-tenor's recitations, Polaroids created a compellingly ambiguous universe of gesture and signification.