It was a brainwave on the part of Bromsgrove Concerts to launch a contemporary music adjunct to its well-established chamber series, and now that brilliant Mixing Music concept is already into its 12th season.

The idea is a happy one, blending cutting-edge scores with somewhat older works, adding the odd student composition, and engaging a resident composer-host to give a friendly perspective on this overview of the past 100 years.

Wednesday's programme was a vibrant example of all that is exciting about Mixing Music, framing three very recent works for violin and piano with two earlier pieces. To all of them soloist Alexandra Wood and pianist Huw Watkins brought performances of commitment and immense character.

Wood plays with panache and absorption and Watkins, himself a composer, with a touching sympathy to whatever style is presented to him by his colleagues. Together they share a partnership of almost supernatural rapport, brilliantly successful even in those not-so-infrequent passages where composers take delight in making their performers follow their own individual, unsynchronised paths.

Watkins' own emotionally-generous Sonata brings some magical sounds in its idiomatic writing. The Suite by his one-time teacher Alexander Goehr, here receiving its European première, breathes a subtle romantic warmth, sequences and repetitions combining with an almost vocal kind of expression.

The earlier pieces, Berio's Due Pezzi and Lutoslawski's Partita, proved interesting reminders of perhaps bygone languages, and Stobrod's Violin, an Ivesian vignette by this season's genial composer-host Philip Cashian, had its magical ending spoiled by the oikish behaviour outside of a small group of Bromsgrove's finest.