The music of the Stockhausens - not just Karlheinz, but that of his trumpeter/composer son Markus too - was one of the themes of the final few days of the Cheltenham festival. Markus had a premiere and gave a concert of improvised music, while the vocal group Rubythroat presented Karlheinz's Stimmung, and pianist Nicolas Hodges included two piano pieces in his recital.

To date there are 18 of those piano pieces, but it is the first 11, all composed in the 1950s, that have made the most important contribution to the postwar piano repertoire. They were works in which Stockhausen steadily refined his own language within a relatively contained framework. Not that the Tenth Piece, with which Hodges ended his recital, is especially contained. It is a massive span of music, lasting well over 20 minutes, which makes huge demands on any pianist. Sensibly, Hodges wore fingerless gloves for his performance, so as not to remove all the skin from his hands when tackling the barrage of tone clusters and glissandos, but he was just as well prepared to deal with the poetry of the music's quieter moments.

That performance overshadowed what had come before. Hodges had played another Stockhausen piano piece, the Fifth, and given a wonderfully lucid account of Webern's Op 28 Variations, interleaving those with Beethoven. There was the Op 77 Fantasie, rarely heard and sometimes sounding more like Weber than Beethoven, and the late A major sonata Op 101, which Hodges played with an intelligence and insight that suggests he ought to be heard more in the 19th-century repertoire.