If there is a collective noun for festivals then Cheltenham needs to know it, for the town now hosts no fewer than six of them each year between February and October.The summer festival of music, though, was by a long way the first to be established (this year's is the 59th) and remains the most substantial - there are 17 days of concerts and fringe events this time. Michael Berkeley has been the artistic director for nine years (he is stepping down after the next festival) and he has worked hard to re-establish Cheltenham's reputation for promoting new music, even if the heady days of the 1960s, when premieres from across Europe crowded into the programmes, are long gone. Refreshingly, Berkeley has tended to look beyond the usual suspects for his featured composers. Last year it was the Australian Peter Sculthorpe, and this time it is an Australian again, though one who has spent a good portion of the past two decades in Europe, where he was a viola player in the Berlin Philharmonic. Born in 1961, Brett Dean only began composing when he was 27, but has quickly established himself with a series of strikingly imaginative pieces.

The festival's opening concert, given by the BBC Symphony conducted by Yan Pascal Tortelier, included the European premiere of Dean's Shadow Music. It's a substantial, three-movement work, full of sombre sonorities, which gradually gains in musical weight. The opening is abrupt and aggressive, the second more elusive, coloured with wispy effects, and the finale is a passacaglia that steadily accelerates as its harmonies are clarified. The performance seemed dutiful rather than committed, and the rest of the programme had the same utilitarian feel. In his centenary year, the music of Lennox Berkeley (a former president of the festival) is prominent too. The Four Poems of St Teresa of Avila, one of his best known works, needs far more energy in the accompaniments than Tortelier gave them, though Sarah Connolly's singing had just the right devotional fervour. The French works didn't inspire much confidence either. There was a rather lumbering - if boldly coloured - account of Dukas's The Sorcerer's Apprentice, and a decidedly dodgy one of Debussy's La Mer, in which the woodwind chording was never as tidy as it should be and the solo trumpet went walkabout in the second movement. Perhaps the BBCSO already had its collective mind on the Proms, which begin in a fortnight's time.