However hard it tries, contemporary music can't and probably shouldn't escape the gravitational pull of the music that's gone before. That applies even at the Huddersfield festival, 10 challenging but amiably quirky days in which the only classics are by Xenakis or Boulez.
You'd have expected the most obvious demonstration this year to come in the opening concert - five works new to the UK, written for and performed by the Freiburg Baroque Orchestra. But Benjamin Schweitzer's flekkicht, which could have been for any ensemble regardless of timbre, made an unpromising start. It wasn't until the third piece - Imprint, by the rising Dutch composer Michel van der Aa - that any of the composers tapped into this ensemble's communicative dynamism.
The late recital, by violinist Mieko Kanno, was compellingly sparing in comparison. Most striking was Jo Kondo's Three Songs of the Elderberry Tree, in which each note of the simple, thoughtful melodies was immediately, calmly distorted by a quarter tone, as if being refracted through cut glass.
The most varied and rewarding programme came from pianist Rolf Hind, violinist David Alberman and singer Loré Lixenberg. Hind's own Hindi song cycle The City of Love was a highlight, with whistling and humming helping violin and prepared piano to weave a delicately resonant web around the extraordinary compass of Lixenberg's voice. Bent Sorensen's Six Songs formed a sensual, introspective duet for Lixenberg and Alberman, but Chris Dench's E(i)ther, a festival commission, seemed a surprisingly overblown musing on the traditional gestures of the romantic violin sonata.
Kanno's recital had included two pieces tracing the changing preoccupations of the Italian recluse Giacinto Scelsi. Conductor James Woods and the New London Chamber Choir took us further, immersing us in Scelsi's largely wordless world - he was experimenting with the effects voices can create long before Stockhausen. In assured performances, the choir conjured the shifting beats created by the interplay between Scelsi's closely stacked, veering lines, and it was hard to believe the Tre Canti sacri were nearly 50 years old. But the plainsong of his Three Latin Prayers showed that even he had an eye on the past.
· Until November 27. Box office: 01484 430528.
