MUSIC / Let bygones be bygones: Stephen Johnson on 'Alternative Vienna' at the South Bank and birdsong at St Giles

VICTOR Lewis-Smith ran a television mini-series called Bygones in which forgotten objects from the child- and teenhoods of 30-somethings - gonks, slinkies, deely-boppers and other horrors - were dredged up and exhibited. It was funny and painfully embarrassing. For new music's 30-somethings there must have been similar feelings during Christian Ofenbauer's piece in Saturday's London Sinfonietta 'Alternative Vienna' concert.

Ofenbauer has only just turned 30 and the work, Two Intermezzi from Medea, dates from 1991, but much of it sounded like a sequence of once-fashionable modernist effects - a bit of scrubbing on the wrong side of the bridge, clicking woodwind keys, brass instruments blown tonelessly, and ticking metronomes - introduced one by one like exhibits in a gallery. No, 'sequence' is too exalted a word: it suggests order, purpose. There was little of that, nor any sense of meaningful connection with the Medea legend.

The works of the other two Vienna composers, Kurt Schwertsik and H K Gruber, were a very welcome alternative. Schwertsik's song cycle Shal-i- mar, settings of moody surrealist poems by H C Artmann, felt somewhat short-winded, the gentle dislocations more confusing than stimulating; it seemed constantly, and frustratingly, on the point of flowering. But his Twilight Music was a delight: a four-movement Celtic folksong suite, lightly scored for the same forces as Schubert's Octet, it has enough irony to save it from tweeness and to thwart its own seemingly escapist tendencies. The Sinfonietta members seemed to enjoy it, especially Nona Liddell, the leader, in the finale, 'At the Fiddler's'.

But the most substantial, thought-provoking and attractive work was Gruber's Cello Concerto. Reviewing the Proms performance last year, I was less than impressed. Now I'm going to have to eat my words: in the cleaner, more intimate space of the Queen Elizabeth Hall, the textures came to life, and the cello part sang more freely. It's a great shame British concert audiences haven't had the chance to hear it played by its dedicatee, Yo-Yo Ma; the humour, the melancholy, the generous lyricism - even the sweet, disco-flavoured tune at the end - would fit him perfectly. Christopher van Kampen, the cellist, coped heroically, though. Not quite everything was audible, but there was strength and heart in his playing.

No one work stood out so sharply in Friday's Music Projects / London 'New Images of Sound' concert at St Giles, Cripplegate. Unprejudiced ears must have found it hard not to be impressed by the refined craft of Simon Holt's Lilith, or entertained by the colourful cleverness of Franco Donatoni's Feria, with its delightfully improbable combination of five flutes, five trumpets and organ - as usual, strong, idiomatic-sounding performances by Richard Bernas and Music Projects / London. The two works by Bill Hopkins, who died in 1981 at the age of 37, provoked strikingly different feelings - admiration for the delicate, moody settings of Rimbaud and Beckett in Sensation (sung and recited sensitively by Alison Wells), and bafflement at the aloof, fragmentary thinking in Nouvelle etude hors serie for organ. My favourite moment, though, was when a blackbird on the roof joined in duet with Nancy Ruffer, the flautist, in Holt's birdsong-inspired Maiastra; perhaps Holt could write it in?