Remembering Steve Martland was the headline for this multi-coloured commemoration of the composer who died suddenly last year aged 53.

But it was a celebration too: the debut appearance of the Late Music Ensemble – nine players conducted by James Whittle, named for the concert series of which this was a part -- and the first performances of short works by Roger Marsh and Whittle himself.

Martland’s Reveille was an apt curtain-raiser, with the alarm-bells of open chords framing catchy staccato rhythms. It moved smoothly into Remembering Lennon, honouring his fellow Liverpudlian.

The work emerged with greater clarity in this revised version than I remember from its Glasgow premiere in 1981. Virtually a theme and variations in reverse, it cleverly welds a spectrum of seemingly diverse elements into a snapshot from Lennon’s Imagine. LME was equally persuasive in the folk-based syncopations of Kick, written for the 1996 European Cup final.

Whittle’s witty homage to Le Grand Départ, Rat Race, was virtually a mini-concerto for electric guitar (the fluent Twm Dylan), its continuous stages evoking freewheeling, uphill struggle, and revolutions.

Marsh’s new Running Jumping and Standing Still, the first of three movements, features explosive chords linked by pianissimo harmonics. The other movements, including delicately darting flute and piano and, finally, a slow-mo walkabout, made a satisfyingly quirky whole.

Five hors-d’oeuvres from Jeremy Dale Roberts’s Croquis and a tour de force of dazzling rhythms in Louis Andriessen’s Workers Union further proved how crisply LME responded to Whittle’s clear-cut direction.