Melvyn Tan made his name as a period-performance fortepianist. He’s since reverted to the piano and its mainstream Romantic repertoire: to celebrate both his 60th birthday and the 40th anniversary of the founding of Spitalfields Music , he chose to give a recital tailormade to honour that institution’s former executive director Judith Serota, in the 18th-century church where many of its concerts are held.

“Variations for Judith: Reflections on Bist du bei mir” is a collection of very short pieces on an aria which Bach originally adapted for his wife Anna Magdalena. The composers are one-time artistic directors of the Spitalfields Festival, along with Richard Rodney Bennett, Peter Maxwell Davies, and Thea Musgrave. What was striking in many of them was the near-homogeneity of style – they could have been one extended piece. A few stood out: Maxwell Davies’s bore the imprint of his unmistakable voice; Thea Musgrave’s was deceptively ingenious in its simultaneous departure from and adherence to the theme, while Richard Rodney Bennett’s had an unexpectedly Chopinesque expressiveness.