Good to see that the useful habit of donating millions to the arts is being passed down the generations. The Wigmore Hall has announced that André Hoffmann - grandson of Paul Sacher, the Swiss billionaire conductor who virtually bankrolled 20th-century music - has himself given £500,000 to enable the venue to commission 50 new works by 50 different composers in the next six years. The hall is also appointing its first resident composer, the promising young Luke Bedford. It's all excellent news, because it puts the Wigmore firmly in the “here and now” of musical life, rather than the “all our yesterdays” category.

Perhaps not unconnected with Hoffmann's gift, the hall has been mounting a mini-celebration of his grandad's extraordinary life - perhaps a little discreet about the love affairs, numerous offspring by different mothers and ruthless money-making; but full of musical interest nonetheless. It culminated on Thursday with the admirable Scottish Ensemble playing three of the most famous string works commissioned by Sacher.

Or at least a curious variant of one of them. This was Richard Strauss's Metamorphosen - but in a version, discovered 18 years ago, for string septet. Strauss apparently penned it as a working-sketch before expanding it for 23 solo strings. Anyone used to the luscious final version - one of the great musical elegies, in which Strauss seems to be turning over the dying embers of German civilisation - will find it fascinating to hear the themes and their transformations stripped to their essence. But, inevitably, much of the contrast between foreground and background is lost, and so is the massive weight of grief when all 23 strings play together at the climax.

Still, credit to the Scottish Ensemble for resuscitating it and for sustaining its half-hour length (and highly exposed, testing lines) so eloquently - the odd moments of errant intonation aside. Earlier, the players didn't muster quite enough precision or pungency to do full justice to Stravinsky's Concerto in D. But they splendidly captured the wildness - and, in the middle movement, the bleak sadness - of Bartók's Divertimento.

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