Mahler's “Symphony of a Thousand” at St Paul's may have been the big bang that ended the City of London Festival. But smaller bangs have their place, especially those from the Pavel Haas Quartet, one of the world's best young string quartets. In their final programme at St Andrew's Church, Holborn, not a hair of a note was out of place; nor was the playing limply beautiful. When Maxwell Davies needed sorrow and anger for A Sad Paven for These Distracted Times, out they poured. And in their namesake's second quartet, From the Monkey Mountain, its folk rhythms shone incandescent.

Still, it was the new piece by Alexander Goehr that really made this concert. Goehr's music can be overstudious, but there was nothing bookish about Since Brass, nor Stone for quartet and percussion (the excellent Colin Currie), composed in memory of Haas and fellow musicians in the Nazi camps. For some 15 minutes strings surged ahead in deliciously hiccupping fugal patterns overlaid with intricate, delicate percussion. The Haas includes percussion, but only to highlight the string textures; Goehr's achievement is to fuse his sound sources into a magical garden of dappled textures. This is music that delights the ear, stimulates the brain and moves the heart: what more can a listener want?

Words, perhaps, or moving pictures? It was left to Counterpoise to provide those at Charterhouse in the final evening's second small bang, a refreshing fantasia on Romantic themes. This new, crazily constituted chamber group (violin, saxophone, trumpet, piano) kicked off with Wagner's Siegfried Idyll, piquantly adapted, moved on to the 19th-century taste for recitations with music (some Liszt and Strauss, grandly strange), then reached its peak climbing the Jungfrau in Edward Rushton and Dagny Gioulami's new mixed-media piece On the Edge.

Here the head didn't know where to turn. To the ascetic video imagery of Syl Betulius? To Eleanor Bron, reading from the alpine recollections of Sir Arnold Lunn? Or perhaps to Rushton's fidgety music, delivered by Counterpoise with aplomb. Rushton has never favoured pieces packed tight as a sausage, and his loose ends seemed particularly fitting for these Post-Modern games played with the Romantic spirit.

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