It should be easy to organise a music festival this year. There are so many significant anniversaries - marking the births or deaths of Biber, Humperdinck, Dvorak and Janacek, Elgar, Delius and Holst, Birtwistle and Maxwell Davies - that putting together a few concerts of those composers gives you, well, most of a Proms season at least. But the director of the Lichfield festival, Meurig Bowen, has come up with a birthday that everyone else on this side of the world seems to have missed. Peter Sculthorpe, doyen of Australian music, is 75 this year, and he is Lichfield's featured composer.

There is a good deal of small-scale Sculthorpe dotted through the festival's programmes, but the main event was altogether more imposing. His Requiem, performed for the first time in Adelaide in March, had its European premiere in Lichfield cathedral, with Jeffrey Skidmore conducting the Ex Cathedra Singers and the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra.

Sculthorpe is most admired for his beautifully coloured instrumental pieces inspired by the Australian landscape. In Europe he is not really thought of as a choral composer, or as an explicitly religious one, though there has always been a spiritual dimension to those magical evocations of place. In the Requiem he brings all these elements together: the text of the mass is combined with an Aboriginal lullaby from southern Queensland, while the choral and orchestral writing is supplemented by a virtuoso role for didgeridoo (remarkably played by William Barton), adding baleful pedals to many of the textures (a reminder that the work was written in the shadow of the Iraq war), and occasionally erupting into cascades of overtones.

There are other illustrative effects too - the cellos are asked to imitate gull cries - but the choral writing, mostly in rhythmic unison, is spare and direct, often echoing plainsong. It's a piece that should be within the capabilities of many choirs in Britain, though they may find it harder in the shires to hire the necessary didgeridooist. It's worth the effort, though: Sculthorpe's quiet poetic voice deserves to be heard.

· The Lichfield festival continues until July 17. Box office: 01543 412121.