Steve Reich's music has regularly featured in Vale festivals, so there was a strong fan base happy to fete his 70th birthday here. Tehillim, Reich's own celebration of his Jewish heritage, motivated by his exploration of percussion styles in Ghana and Bali, proved the perfect vehicle.

In setting four psalms - Tehillim is Hebrew for psalms - Reich follows the words' natural flow to create far longer melodic phrases than his usual motoric motives. Nevertheless, the canonic imitations and interplay between the four solo voices, percussion and winds carry Reich's characteristic rhythmic vibrancy, and Australian conductor Luke Dollman maintained a balance that allowed the intricacies of counterpoint to register as well as the thrusting energy. The vibrato-free purity of the amplified voices of the four female singers, Synergy Vocals, rang through Llandaff Cathedral. When the calm of the slow third section, Psalm 19, gave way to an explosion of Hallelujahs in the fourth, the sense of the composer's spiritual homecoming was palpable, and the music's implicit joy wonderfully realised.

The Reich piece - Judaic in a Christian cathedral - had a parallel in Georges Lentz's Monh. This was the UK premiere of the Australian's piece for viola, orchestra and electronics. It's part of his massive cycle, Coeli Enarrant (The Heavens Are Telling), whose title is also from Psalm 19. In Monh, the Aboriginal word for stars, the viola gives voice to the quiet musings of an individual fathoming life's mysteries as reflected in the night sky. Soloist Philip Dukes was acutely sensitive to the constellations of sound set up with different instruments, including computer-manipulated harp, so that both the composer's self-confessed existential angst and his understated passion could be felt.

The resonant strings of the BBC National Orchestra of Wales expressed the almost ecstatic moods of Peteris Vasks's Musica Appassionata and John Metcalf's Mapping Wales. Harpist Lucy Wakeford was a strong foil.