The young Cornish composer Richard Ayres is a bundle of contradictions. He claims not to compose, but "simply to collect stuff", yet his output is a meticulously orchestrated tissue of modern and romantic references. He says his work has no narrative content, yet it is inextricably bound up with his own personal mythology. He declares a fascination for mountains, yet has chosen to live in the Netherlands.

As the final featured composer at this year's Huddersfield contemporary music festival, Ayres contributed an exuberant programme of British premieres dedicated to the ongoing adventures of his fictional alter ego, a Cornish painter named Valentine Tregashian, who communicates only through music.

Tregashian is not so much a character as a strange, sonic sounding board designed to amplify the composer's dreams and obsessions. No 36 (NONcerto for Horn) opens with Tregashian's meditations on an enigmatic Swiss girl. Rather than ascending in a blaze of glory, however, Ayres's rich scoring coughs to a halt, like a Strauss tone-poem with a faulty starter motor.

The work is one of a series of "NONcertos" in which the soloist, rather than becoming the vaulting hero of the romantic tradition, is cast as a stumbling, fumbling little guy struggling to keep up. The score obliges soloist Wim Timmermans to be in two places at once, sprinting between two podiums placed at either side of the stage. It's a way of keeping fit, I suppose.

No 33 (Valentine Tregashian Considers ...) is a large-scale cantata with a lush, pastoral theme that brings the excellent Exaudi vocal ensemble to the fore. Ayres's vocal writing is characteristically erratic, ranging from an exquisite monotone setting of Pablo Neruda's love poems to some bizarre barbershop harmonies and interludes of plaintive snivelling. Conductor Roland Kluttig handled the eclecticism remarkably well, while the disciplined Asko Ensemble performed with considerable grace.