Dominic Muldowney

It could never have been predicted that Mrs Thatcher would preside like an Astraea over a renaissance of British music, but the past seven years have proved astonishingly productive, and the summer festival at the South Bank is reflecting some of the dazzle. Just twenty-four hours after the premiere of Birtwistle's new opera, the London Sinfonietta were back with a programme of new and very new music by younger composers. Apart from two contrasted dawnscapes, Simon Holt's ominous … era madrugada and George Benjamin's celebratory At First Light, all the works came from the past year or so.

Dominic Muldowney's new Sinfonietta is an exceedingly smart piece. It takes on the challenge that Schoenberg took on in his First Chamber Symphony, that of creating a continuity that functions both as a sonata allegro and as a complete four-movement composition: in other words, one gets to the end of the first movement and finds one has reached the end of the whole. Rheingold might be another example, though there, of course, when one comes to the end one is just in time for the real beginning. Muldowney anticipates Wagner by starting with something that is both beginning and end: a tick-tock downward phrase makes an opening gambit, while the brass rush up in a staccato jazzy closure, a gesture that will often be repeated in varied forms.