With a line-up identical to that of Schubert's Trout Quintet - piano and four strings including double bass - the Schubert Ensemble inevitably spends most of its time exploring 19th-century chamber music. But it has a valiant history of performing new works too, and this Purcell Room appearance was turned into a showcase of seven of the scores (from a grand total of more than 25) it has commissioned, ranging from a Michael Berkeley piece of 1985 to two premieres of works by composers still in their early 20s.

Berkeley's tightly structured From the Savage Messiah, a homage to the French sculptor Gaudier-Brzeska, is a fierce, impressive piece, extracting far more from the prescribed instrumentation than the salon niceties that some of the other composers in the programme produced. Graham Fitkin's MacGuffin was like comfort food - bland, doughy and of low nutritional value - while Piers Hellawell's The Building of Curves masked its commonplaces in over-written textures and redundant figuration. At least both Howard Skempton's tiny Spadesbourne Suite and Martin Butler's American Rounds set out unashamedly to ingratiate themselves, and did so in a modest and accomplished way.

The brand-new works could hardly have been more different. Undoings, by the Oxford undergraduate Lee Dunleavy, was a nicely imagined essay in texture, its silence-punctuated gestures owing quite bit to the example of Wolfgang Rihm; for someone whose research interest is Brian Ferneyhough, Dunleavy's music is surprisingly visceral in its impact. But Edward Rushton's L'An Mil, a vision of the turning of the last millennium rather than the recent one, set out from a very different stylistic position, with string and piano figuration that unmistakably echoed Debussy and Ravel; the way that Rushton tied the threads of his piece together to make a perfectly balanced whole, though, revealed a genuinely contemporary sense of form.