James MacMillan makes a speciality of writing music commemorating terrible accidents or atrocities. To his detractors that puts him in the same slightly dubious bracket as ambulance-chasing lawyers. But a socially responsible composer surely has a duty to reflect, and reflect upon, public anguish — to articulate through music those churning feelings that cannot easily be put into words. And the 50-year-old Scot does that supremely well.

He wrote his clarinet quintet Tuireadh more than 18 years ago, in memory of the 167 men who died in the 1988 Piper Alpha oil-platform disaster off the Scottish coast. It constantly mulls over the same musical material — like a grieving wife or mother, perhaps, constantly asking “why?” and getting no answers, or at least no answers that provide consolation. That material includes an ethereal, chorale-like refrain using harmonics; string glissandos that evoke the mournful “keening” of Gaelic vocal music; single notes that grow from inaudibility, like a gentle waft of breeze stirring sullen sea waves; and, by way of contrast, explosive and violently jagged cadenzas, particularly for the clarinet.

The piece is long, perhaps a little too long. But to me it seems to encapsulate perfectly the clashing public sentiments about the Piper Alpha tragedy — the desolation and helplessness; the anger and disbelief; the grief, but also the surge of communal compassion for the bereaved and the victims. It also evokes powerfully the sea itself: eternal, untameable, and imperturbable to human misfortune.

Tuireadh was but one highlight in this fine City of London Festival concert by the Nash Ensemble. In accordance with the festival’s whimsical theme — following, in music, the latitude of 60 degrees north — it also included Prokofiev’s fabulously klezmer-ish Overture on Jewish Themes, Sibelius’s lugubrious and very Finnish Malinconia for cello (the impassioned Paul Watkins) and piano, and Shostakovich’s enigmatic Piano Quintet, with its elegiac fugue, furious scherzo and bafflingly throwaway finale. There was also a very different MacMillan piece: a deliciously decadent-sounding trifle called For Max, written for Sir Peter Maxwell Davies’s 70th birthday. How comradely that both composers were present to hear it!

On an airless evening there was probably one piece too many — but which to cut? It was all gripping in different ways.

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