Huddersfield Contemporary Music Festival, Huddersfield

Variety in a Nordic climate

The Huddersfield Contemporary Music Festival has a new artistic director in Suzanna Eastburn who, still in her early thirties, is likely to seek out new sounds for a new generation. Given her keen interest in Nordic music, Eastburn must have been delighted to inherit the rich seam of music from northern climes that dominated the opening weekend.

Ilan Volkov, shortly to succeed Osmo Vanska at the BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra, showed himself to be a cool and persuasive advocate of a wide range of styles in a concert by the Norwegian ensemble BIT20. In Hans Abrahamsen's piano concerto, with its continuous argument and mysteriously charged intensity, Anne Marie Abildskov's candid playing combined imaginative flair with idiomatic delivery.

Anyone who thinks new music is boring should hear Gary Peterson play Mysteries of the Macabre, Elgar Howarth's inventive transcriptions for trumpet and orchestra from Ligeti's opera Le grand macabre. More music hall than music theatre the performers left no doubt that here were top-rank players teamed-up for the sheer fun of making music.

The Szymanowski Quartet gave the first performance of Philip Cashian's The Masque of the Red Death. Here the parallels between the unhinged musical drama and Edgar Allan Poe's plague-ridden principality become uncomfortably vivid. Philip Glass's Fifth String Quartet may resemble one of his soundtracks, but in the Quartet's fluent treatment of the score Glass's surreal sound world came across as polished and ingenious.

Eight world premieres in a lunchtime concert by two percussionists is probably a record, even for Huddersfield. The new works were framed by Per Norgard's haunting Re percussion, and Xenakis's stunning solo Psappha bravely tackled by Chris Brannick and Richard Benjafield. The eight new miniatures brought together the bizarre – Peter McGarr's Language of Ghosts – and the intriguing – Rolf Hind's Thirteen O'Clock Shadow. Collectively titled Lullabies and Nightmares, the former could easily induce the latter so sinister is the effect of a lullaby like Peter Wiegold's Angel of Night played on a musical saw and vibraphone. The prizes for economy, for ignoring the vast array of percussion in preference for six wine glasses and a bottle of mineral water, and for the most amusing title both surely go to Stephen Montague for his Philup Glas. This concert's touring and worth catching.

Huddersfield Contemporary Music Festival continues until 2 December (01484 430528, www.hcmf.co.uk)