A bigger audience, a warmer ambience � Napier University�s Sonic Fusion Festival, whatever its earlier shortcomings, ended with a flourish.

Star rating ****
A bigger audience, a warmer ambience - Napier University's Sonic Fusion Festival, whatever its earlier shortcomings, ended with a flourish. True, the ability to start on time eluded Sunday's performers just as it did other participants in this sometimes haphazard nine-day event.

But at least the youthful Research Ensemble's rather clinical name proved not to be a deterrent, and their choice of music, celebrating two birthdays, was exemplary. The birthdays were Nigel Osborne's 60th, which fell in June, and Elliott Carter's 100th, due in December.

The resulting "portrait" concert consisted mostly of lightning sketches, starting with Osborne's Adagio for Vedran Smailovic, a short Elgarian elegy for solo cello, composed for the principal cellist of the Sarajevo Opera Orchestra, who for 22 days in the 1990s played Albinoni's famous Adagio at the site of a Balkan bomb atrocity where 22 people had been killed while queueing for food. If this, with Betsy Taylor as cellist, provided the most emotional moments of the evening, it found a lighter counterpart in a second piece by Edinburgh's politically conscious Reid professor, Taw-raw for solo violin, evocative of Burmese fiddle music (a taw-raw being a species of fiddle) and filled with the murmur of birds, insects and running water, ravishingly conveyed by Andrea Gajic.

Between these came a birthday present from Stephen Davismoon, the festival's director, entitled In Search of Peace, 60 syllables of pensive soprano song voiced by Taylor Wilson.

Then, interspersed with other things, came two climactic samples of Carter, his brilliant 1950 exercise for wind quartet called Eight Etudes and a Fantasy and his succinct but intricately eloquent 1999 song cycle about the passage of time, Tempo e Tempi.