Everything about the music of Howard Skempton - which was featured in the opening concerts of this festival - is very precisely understated. The composer himself was the soloist in the accordion pieces, which are key to his approach: fragments whose essence is extreme simplicity. Yet there was a solemn austerity about their delivery that made some seem impenetrable, though the dances, with their side-stepping harmony, had a sweet irony, and the Hornpipe could have been for a morose Captain Pugwash.

Skempton songs, sung by the ensemble Exaudi, widened the frame. With a single voice to each part, the niceties of harmony could be neatly pointed up, those in his setting of RS Thomas's Song at the Year's Turning were particularly effective, as was Skempton's arrangement of his teacher Cornelius Cardew's Ode Machine 7' from The Great Learning, with the pleasing bass solo of Jimmy Holiday.

A piece by Exaudi's director James Weeks received its premiere. The Liebeslied als Geige set words by Rilke and was conceived as a partner to the Selbstbildnis als Laute which followed. Weeks' soft dissonances and fractured textures had a haunting, enigmatic quality, only partly resolved in the soprano lullaby that invites the final acquiescence.

In the earlier concert, Graham Fitkin and Ruth Wall also appeared as composer/performers. Fitkin at the piano was robust and upfront. Wall, with her clarsach, was more fey, so the tiny drama that played out when she performed Two Movements for small harp by Laurence Crane - a demented crane-fly dizzied in the spotlight and finally dived through the harp-strings - was not an unwelcome distraction.