After decades in which the prospect of hearing new music sent a shudder through concert-hall audiences, living composers are again being embraced by performers and listeners. That's as it should be. In Mozart's day nearly everything was new. The “concert hall as museum” is very much a lamentable 20th-century invention.

The danger is that today's composers, basking in unexpected affection, now veer to the other extreme and produce nothing but innocuous divertissements. Listening to Birthday Candles, for instance - seven little premieres commissioned by the chamber group Mobius to mark its tenth anniversary - was never an unpleasurable experience. The pieces were expertly crafted and shaped with epigrammatic concision (none longer than five minutes). And each showcased a different virtuoso in this ensemble of top London orchestral principals. But a lot of the music did sound like film or TV soundtracks without the pictures.

Huw Watkins's mistily pastoral Postlude - it should have been called The Flute Ascending - could have served for Midsomer Murders. Alec Roth's quirky and gently jazzy Death by Figs might have prefaced a P. G. Wodehouse adaptation. George Tsontakis's Cellobius, a series of yearning cello phrases over Debussy-like oscillations, was perfect backing for a nature film about - oh, pansies probably. And Sally Beamish's elegiac Thorns, for harp and cello, struck me as being ideal for one of those dark Danish movies about incest in remote fishing communities.

All very atmospheric, but also oddly bland. Roxanna Panufnik's Rose had more interest: solo violin phrases echoed by other instruments, until the echoes coalesced into a luscious accompaniment. And I also liked Diana Burrell's Birthday Candle, in which an array of tinkling percussion instruments embellished Robert Plane's dazzling clarinet cascades.

But only Rhian Samuel's Emerging (Lightly) struck me as having enough musical argument to grip the brain as well as tickle the ear. Here the viola was the still centre of a quicksilver polyphonic whirl, before intoning a haunting folk-like tune over an oasis of calm G major. The impression was of a serene character quelling fractious colleagues. Intriguing and stimulating, rather than merely pleasant and inoffensive.

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