London Sinfonietta / Knussen, Queen Elizabeth Hall, London

From the exotic to, just possibly, the quixotic. First, there was Trumpets!, a day's celebration of this instrument, put together by the virtuoso trumpet player John Wallace and culminating in one of the most delightful concerts the Sinfonietta has surely ever given. Then we had one of Oliver Knussen's typical evenings rummaging in the corners of the various modernisms that seem most particularly to have had their day.

Trumpets! was part of an ambitious education project in Glasgow, and the main concert itself was presented both north and south of the border. Indeed, there were so many pieces crammed into the evening's programme that, even after they had sadly jettisoned Birtwistle's Ritual Fragment in the London show, HK Gruber's recently written Zeitfluren (Timescapes) - a magnificently prolix, timbrally tingling, two-movement work concluding with a vivid Viennese whirl - seemed almost too much of a good thing.

Especially as we had also already heard, in addition to everything from Gabrieli to Varèse, the premiere of Stuart MacRae's trumpet concerto, Interact - also in two movements (fast-slow, in nice contrast to Gruber's slow-fast) - which featured Wallace himself in the course of a deep and dark exploration of some emotionally charged counterpoint, as well as all the fun and ferocity of a variety of duos with other brass instruments in the ensemble.

Most magnificent, however, were the three long copper trumpets played by Abbos, a specially invited Uzbek group that also includes a reedy, virtuosic oboe-like instrument and handheld drums. I'd have liked to hear more from these splendid musicians in their own national music.

Yet most invigorating of all were Peter Wiegold's three pieces entitled the great wheel. These fruits of a visit that Wiegold made to Uzbekistan brought together the Uzbek musicians and some of the players from the Sinfonietta - not in some cheap exotic trip that relied on the frisson of the Uzbeks' priapic brass and fun-filled drumming, but in something that offered, at least in the second and third pieces, an entirely fresh and truly integrated approach to the mix of East and West.

After all this, the severely classical outlines, flatfooted humour and dry-as-dust lyricism of Alexander Goehr's new work, Marching to Carcassonne, seemed stillborn - brilliantly though the work was played by the solo pianist Peter Serkin and the Sinfonietta under Knussen.

Detlev Glanert's Chamber Sonata No 3 showed its composer to be a master of the compelling gesture and of instrumental finesse. And Charles Wuorinen's Cyclops, although like the Goehr suffering from the dead hand of academic wit, had a raw clarity of instrumentation that helped somehow to make it seem almost likeable.