The Huddersfield Contemporary Music festival - for 25 years the most significant annual event in the British new-music calendar - is under new management. Graham McKenzie took over as artistic director in January, promising to "broaden the artistic scope". Some feared that meant the end of the Huddersfield they valued, but he has balanced innovation against the festival's traditional strengths.

There is, though, a much higher profile for improvised music this year, one reflected in the choice of composer-in-residence, Barry Guy, who, as both composer and double-bass player, has always been as much at home in jazz as in the classical avant garde. The City of London Sinfonia and conductor Sian Edwards brought two of Guy's substantial recent scores to the festival. In concerto for orchestra Fallingwater, improvised passages alternate with fully notated ones. Folio - in which two violinists (Maya Homburger, playing a baroque instrument, and Muriel Cantoreggi on a modern-strung one) together with Guy himself as bassist, are set against 10 more strings - created an hour-long sequence of proliferating textures; all a bit too much of a good thing in which the exact notes mattered much less than generalised effects.

The Northern Sinfonia's appearance with their inspirational music director, Thomas Zehetmair, was more rewarding. Designed as a memorial to Ligeti, their concert included three of his glistening works alongside a pair of premieres - Agustín Fernández's rather cinematic Mystical Dances, and Farness, a song cycle for soprano Patricia Rozario, by John Casken, in which three rather slight poems by Carol Ann Duffy about separated lovers got a Bergian orchestral treatment that sometimes seemed disproportionately intense.

· The festival continues until Sunday. Box office: 01484 430528.