With the long-standing exceptions of Cheltenham and Aldeburgh, British summer festivals never quite know what to do about contemporary music. Some ignore it altogether, others pay it lip service.

Over the past decade or so, however, the King's Lynn festival has done better than most. Though it no longer spotlights one particular composer - figures such as Alexander Goehr and Nicholas Maw have featured in the past - there is still much more than a token presence, and the Contemporary Consort, formed at the Royal College of Music five years ago, seems to have become a regular visitor.

The consort's basic line-up is piano trio plus a flute, which means that the four players rarely get the opportunity to play as a quartet. But the programme of British music they put together here this year made maximum use of all their talents.

Britten provided the ballast. His Cello Sonata was pungently played by Naomi Williams and Huw Watkins, and his only mature work for solo piano, Night Piece, seemed haunted, as Watkins presented it, by the unlikely ghost of Brahms. There was more Brahms behind Michael Finnissy's piano trio In Stiller Nacht, which uses the song of the same title as an excuse to wallow in some overripe melodic writing and to swim through some turbulent harmonies, and more nocturnal contemplation in Timothy Salter's Three Night Pieces, in which a cello shadows the melodic tracings of an alto flute.

Daniel Giorgetti's Dialogue for violin and piano raised the emotional temperature with its extravagant gestures and sometimes explosive confrontations between the two instruments, and Nicholas Sackman's Fling, for flute, cello and piano, kept it on the boil. Sackman packs a lot into 11 minutes - three linked movements that progress from skirling rhythmic unisons, through gentler, ruminative gestures broken by unexpected stops and starts, to a final moto perpetuo - and plenty of challenges for the instrumentalists, who didn't put a foot or a finger wrong all evening.