Composers from Luigi Nono to George Crumb have been inspired by the life and work of Federico García Lorca, but few have been influenced so profoundly as Simon Holt. Lorca's discovery of the folk music of southern Spain fired his imagination and infused his writing, and Holt's music has taken over that pungency and passion. The starting point for the Almeida Ensemble's programme was a sequence of his miniatures - Brief Candles for clarinet, Feet of Clay for cello and the early solo flute Maiastra - which showed how the inflections and melancholy of Lorca's expressive world were translated into his instrumental writing.

Conductor Richard Bernas devised the programme, which was staged by Mike Ashman, unnecessarily as far as the Holt pieces were concerned - where the wandering of the players distracted from the energy of the instrumental writing - but more potently in Berio's Folk Songs, which ended the concert. Mezzo Sally Burgess had already closed the first half, singing one of Lorca's own folk-song transcriptions, and strewing around the stage some of the objects - a photograph, a red feather, a piece of wood - that would figure later in her performance of the Berio cycle.

They generated some telling imagery, but as always it was the verve of Berio's arrangements that dazzled; the sounds he conjures from a seven-piece ensemble, and the way the energy of the polylglot songs is channelled so expertly and indelibly. Burgess caught all that, and the impersonations each song involves, with neat theatricality, and made the link back to Lorca, reinventing the exuberance of the folk art that so enraptured the poet when he first encountered it in the 1920s.