Amongst the plenitude of lunchtime concerts around London, no venue could have been more enticing yesterday than the glorious Chapel in Greenwich, with the winter sun streaming in.

A challenging programme attracted some 60 people to hear TCM students tackling contemporary music under the guidance of Gregory Rose. This proved an uncommonly rewarding hour of music making.

Dai Fujikura's burgeoniong career has been followed by Musical Pointers as far as Lucerne, and his 5th Station (of the Cross?) for ensemble, featuring trumpet and cello soloists, has had wide exposure with prestigious ensembles, including London Sinfonietta, which has recorded it on CD.

On this occasion its progress seemed to be of the "anything goes" ilk, with disparate events stitched together with no obvious coherence. I gather it is really meant to be given with the instrumentalists scattered around the hall, which might have been more interesting though problematic for maintaining good ensemble? Julian Anderson is well established as a successful and influential composer and his tribute to the Alhambra in Granada is a rich, dense tapestry for a large chamber ensemble.

More interesting to me however were two works in the middle of the programme. Alan Taylor's was the more unusual these days for having a discernible symphonic like development of small motifs (Sibelius came strongly to my mind). In four short movements played without a break its structure was coherent and persuasive. Now a mature composition student at TCM, he and I participated long ago in a COMA Summer School at which was premiered Stephen Montague's Dark Sun commemorating the nuclear bombing of Hiroshima; I 'played' the transistor radio and Alan soprano saxophone, he reminds me... Alan Taylor's biography on line is of considerable interest; he has long been composing, mainly for amateur musicians in connection with COMA.

Stephen Montague's Wild Nights was the undoubted 'hit' of this concert. An ingenious music-theatre piece, it set an Emily Dickinson poem thrice, followed by a short epilogue, given in changing situations around the piano. Russian dramatic mezzo-soprano Alessia Mankouskaya carried the role memorably, but did not come back for a second call to receive the ovation which awaited her.

For details of TCM events open to the public see http://www.tcm.ac.uk/RVEf1e39e07e4e349b89634d995b5413f5d,,.aspx

Peter Grahame Woolf