In his newly published history of the Huddersfield festival, its founding director Richard Steinitz documents how James Dillon's development as a composer has been intertwined with Huddersfield for more than 30 years. The very first festival in 1978 included the premiere of the earliest piece that Dillon now acknowledges, and his new scores have featured regularly ever since, often keeping Britain in touch with a composer who remains far more performed elsewhere in Europe than he is here.
This year's Huddersfield programme includes two UK premieres from Dillon. The first of them, Oslo/Triptych, for eight instrumentalists, was introduced by Cikada, the Norwegian group that had given the first performance in the Netherlands a week earlier, and provided the bright spot in what was otherwise a rather downbeat clutch of opening concerts. The piece is the second part of what Dillon intends to be a trilogy of instrumental triptychs. Two years ago the festival included his Leuven Triptych, for which one of the starting points was a painting by Van der Weyden; this time the extra-musical element is quotations from Virgil, Coleridge and Apollinaire, which are heard spoken in the distorted recordings that periodically infiltrate the instrumental textures.
Though the connections between the texts and the music they generate are oblique to say the least, as in so much of Dillon's recent work it's the vivid writing that really engages the ear and teases the brain. Its expressive range seems to widen with every score, and here there's a hand-pumped harmonium, played by the pianist and clearly a bit of a Cikada speciality, to add a new colour to the instrumental palette. As well as the characteristically dense, highly wrought string writing there are explosive solos for the clarinet, brooding low-register ones for the flute, and woozy, almost neo-romantic interludes for the piano to provide moments of calm in the course of the half-hour piece. Even when the meaning is obscure, it's all still totally compelling.
Later that day, the London Sinfonietta's visit to the festival began inauspiciously, with a quartet of electro-acoustic pieces by composers unknown to me that were linked only by their lack of originality and total absence of striking ideas. Extraordinarily the festival's programme book this year includes no biographies of any composers or performers, not even dates of birth, so it was impossible to know during the concert whether these pieces were student efforts or written by older composers. In fact all were experienced figures, two of them in their 40s, so they should have known better.
Things improved with the premiere of an ambitious, half-hour piano concerto by Larry Goves. In Things That Are Blue, Things That Are White, Things That Are Black, the soloist – the sparky, always imaginative Sarah Nicolls, for whom it was written – plays a microtonally tuned electric piano and a prepared piano, as well as a regular concert grand, while the accompanying ensemble, conducted by André de Ridder, is dominated by violins, 16 of them, pitted against a handful of other instruments, all electronically enhanced. It's a curious piece, constantly toying with the archetype of a romantic piano concerto – hence the massed violins – and not entirely successful, but conjuring some striking effects, often the simplest ones, like the slow movement's use of the prepared piano, whose percussive lines are etched against the slowly moving strings.
• The festival continues until Sunday. Box office: 01484 430528
