These three scores by Simon Holt, composed between 2005 and 2008, are all evocations of the fantastical and the visionary. witness to a snow miracle, a violin concerto originally written for Viviane Hagner but performed here by Chloë Hanslip, concerns itself with Christian martyrdom and has a title derived from a prose-poem by the sage Austrian writer WG Sebald. St Vitus in the kettle depicts 16th-century German peasants dancing in front of a statue to St Vitus, who had been boiled alive in a kettle in medieval times. a table of noises is a percussion concerto, performed by its dedicatee Colin Currie, and is a further reflection on ghosts and the afterlife inspired this time by Holt’s Uncle Ashworth, who practised the dark arts of taxidermy.

The briefer St Vitus is sandwiched between the two concertos, and the performances are difficult to fault. The choreography of the percussion concerto finds Currie sat on a cajón (a big hollow boom-box drum) with other percussion instruments arranged in front of him on a table, pieces of metal and wood primed to scissor through sound like his uncle would once have sawed through flesh. From its agitated Bartókian introductory cadenza, the violin concerto pampers the soloist, balletic melodic flourishes shining against Mexican-wave woodwind and the neon afterglow of metal percussion and harp.

And yet nothing about this music feels satisfying or memorable. Holt is messing with some weighty, shamanistic concepts here – the occult, ancient rituals, glimpses of the afterlife – but there is no corresponding friction or ambiguity in the harmony; no capacity for his chromatically evened-out harmonies to trigger surprises, which leaves the violin concerto reshuffling a set of lifeless patterns. The percussion concerto is underwritten and cautious. Cascades of brightly orchestrated descending woodwind register as a mere colouristic effect, whereas in Ligeti’s music – the source of such gestures – oddly stacked non-standard scales give the notes an actual function. A passage devoted to Uncle Ash’s dog desperately wants to be witty but lacks the harmonic tools to deliver any punchline; a later section grooves, but the plainness of the harmony and cloying square rhythms funk only like Julie Andrews twerking.