When the City of London Festival wanted a composer to mark all their chosen seven cities on the latitude of 60 degrees north (one of this year’s more whimsical themes, not least when you start to think about the gulf between Kirkwall, Orkney Islands and St Petersburg, Russia), there was one obvious choice. Nigel Osborne, whose last big commission for the festival explored the legacy of the Bosnian war, is a passionate European (and polyglot) whose work and studies have taken him across the continent.

Thankfully, his brief but effective Seven words, seven icons, seven cities doesn’t try to paint individual postcards so much as string these chilly destinations together in one cool chapter. Fragments from national texts, from Gaelic to Estonian, Finnish to Russian, are mixed up with their English translations and sung with a rapt plangency by the voices of Tenebrae. As with many of Osborne’s other works, the tension — more obviously expressed in the quivering accompaniment from the string players of the Scottish Ensemble — is tradition versus modernity. The “icons” in question are mostly those of contemporary technology — radio frequencies for Oslo, a ship’s engine for Kirkwall — which feed into the spikier textures of the music, as well as the sombre, striking videos produced by Cathie Boyd and Angelica Kroeger to partner the piece.

Seven words was also commissioned as a companion for the evening’s main event, James MacMillan’s Seven Last Words from the Cross. It’s a brave, unflinching piece, which won its composer the 1995 Mercury Music Prize, and it was given a brave, unflinching performance. Whether it really manages to turn religious contemplation into musical transcendence may depend on a listener’s spiritual commitment, however. Here, it seemed overlong and rather underinflected, its seven, agonised sections not so much building to a climax as simply piling on the agony, and the rather saccharine video art designed for this performance (by Boyd and James Houston) didn’t fill the gap.

Good for the Scottish Ensemble, then, that they were also able to flex their considerable muscle in Shostakovich’s Chamber Symphony — an arrangement of the composer’s moving String Quartet No 8 — which was delivered with tragic, taut finality.

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