The new Late Music season, with concerts on the first Saturday of every month until October, opened in somewhat subdued style, but was nonetheless satisfying.

A native of Goole, composer Gavin Bryars has long enjoyed an international reputation. In recent years he has written more than 40 pieces inspired by the “spirit and form” of the lauda, a single-line spiritual song of the 13th century. It predominated here.

Audrey Riley's solo cello gave fluent, plaintive voice to his Tre Laude Dolçe, and to his slow, song-like Lauda Con Sordino, which benefited from Bryars' gently rippling piano accompaniment. Optional electric guitar seemed superfluous to both.

Three Elegies for Nine Clarinets saw Roger Heaton alternating live clarinets, in a basically slow pulse enlivened by vivid accompaniment from taped clarinets, all in neo-romantic harmony, a satisfying blend.

The pervading melancholy of Bryars’ new Lauda Rubata a Tre, for bass clarinet, electric guitar and cello, proved pleasingly mesmeric, even with rapid clarinet riffs, dying out with pizzicato cello.

Craig Vear, ex-pupil of Bryars, used an Arts Council Fellowship to make Antarctic field recordings. One result was Three Last Letters, in memoriam Capt Scott, Dr Wilson & Lt Bowers. A collage intended to evoke Scott's last moments in his tent alone, its relentless wind sounds made Scott's writings, sung or spoken, hard to discern, against added improvisations from Bryars’ ensemble. A good idea in theory, in practice it lacked spaciousness, shape or the silence of loneliness.