There may be something a bit predictable about the theme of Spring Sounds, Orchestra of the Swan's four-concert Stratford season, but this celebration of Benjamin Britten's life and music takes a refreshingly different approach from many of this year's other centenary tributes. With major Britten scores in each programme, the music played has been almost exclusively 20th and 21st century, including a healthy number of brand new works. In the strings-only final concert, the premiere came from Huw Watkins, who, under a scheme funded by the Royal Philharmonic Society, is currently the orchestra's "composer in the house".

Watkins's Little Symphony is a shapely quarter-hour span, lucidly assembled from two interlocking pairs of movements – the first unstable, agitated and unpredictable, the second placid and reflective, spinning out slowly evolving lines over long-held pedal notes. The two types of music never come together – there's no definitive climax to the piece – so the final effect is slightly mysterious, as its two musical worlds remain in parallel and separate from each other.

The Britten work that ended the series was the Variations on a Theme of Frank Bridge, conducted by David Curtis with tremendous gusto, so that what the performance just occasionally lacked in polish and precision it much more than compensated for in sheer energy and enthusiasm. The programme had begun with the Frank Bridge piece that had supplied Britten with his theme – the lovely, early (1906) Three Idylls, originally for string quartet.

That was followed by Takemitsu's Three Film Scores, short movements extracted from the music he composed for almost 100 movies. Its delicious Broadway-style melody in the first movement, pulsing unease in the second and cod-Viennese waltz in the third revealed a side of the composer that his delicately tinted, exquisitely shaped concert music never suggests.

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